Robust parameter estimation with outlier-contaminated correlated measurements and applications to aerodynamic coefficient identification

Abstract

We consider the robust parameter estimation problem for state-space models with correlated measurements in the presence of outliers. Both the scenarios that the statistical information of the nominal noises in state-space models is known or not are explored. A novel Kalman robust smoother is proposed via introducing a specific reweighting approach to estimate the system parameters as well as the states when the nominal noise covariances are known. For the case where the statistic information of the nominal noise is absent, a modified expectation–maximization algorithm is introduced and integrated into the proposed robust smoother for simultaneously estimating the unknown states, system parameters, and the noise covariances. The performance of the proposed methods is illustrated by solving the aerodynamic coefficient identification problem with the real flight data set. The simulation results reveal that the proposed approaches outperform several existing solutions when outliers occur in multiple components of correlated measurements.