Robust Adaptive Heading Tracking Fusion for Polarization Compass With Uncertain Dynamics and External Disturbances

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For the polarization compass (PC), maintaining high-precision and high-robustness autonomous measurement of the heading information under conditions where the atmospheric polarized light is being blocked or disturbed represents a challenging problem. In this paper, the E-vector orientation algorithm, which provides high orientation accuracy and real-time performance in sunny weather, and the symmetric axis orientation algorithm, which offers a strong anti-interference ability in occluded environments, are integrated to solve this problem. Furthermore, an improved state error model is established to increase the accuracy of the heading estimation. To track the system state rapidly and circumvent the uncertainties caused by measurement noise variance, an improved variational Bayesian strong tracking cubature Kalman filter (VBSTCKF) is proposed to estimate both the state and the time-varying measurement noise variance accurately. In addition, a multi-frequency data fusion algorithm based on residual compensation is proposed to overcome the inconsistent sampling operation frequency problems of the two orientation algorithms. The outstanding feature is that the proposed multi-frequency VBSTCKF (MF-VBSTCKF) can improve the orientation precision and robustness while also ensuring the high-frequency output performance. Finally, experimental results acquired in occluded environments verify the superiority of the proposed method.