New fault-tolerant federated Kalman filters for integrated navigation

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to achieve accurate integrated navigation results for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems even in the presence of possible navigation faults in the subsystems of the federated Kalman filter.Design/methodology/approachThe federated Kalman filter is modified from two aspects to get accurate navigation results under abnormity. First, time-variant vector distribution coefficients trading off the navigation accuracy and the observability degree of each state component are computed to replace the traditional scalar coefficients. Second, a fault-tolerant filter is proposed as the local navigation filter.FindingsSimulations for the navigation of a UAV system show that the proposed method can be applied for accurate navigation purpose even in the presence of subsystem navigation faults.Originality/valueNew fault-tolerant federated Kalman filters for integrated navigation are presented to achieve accurate navigation solutions.