Terrain navigation using Bayesian statistics

Abstract

The performance of terrain-aided navigation of aircraft depends on the size of the terrain gradient in the area. The point-mass filter (PMF) described in this work yields an approximate Bayesian solution that is well suited for the unstructured nonlinear estimation problem in terrain navigation. It recursively propagates a density function of the aircraft position. The shape of the point-mass density reflects the estimate quality; this information is crucial in navigation applications, where estimates from different sources often are fused in a central filter. Monte Carlo simulations show that the approximation can reach the optimal performance, and realistic simulations show that the navigation performance is very high compared with other algorithms and that the point-mass filter solves the recursive estimation problem for all the types of terrain covered in the test. The main advantages of the PMF is that it works for many kinds of nonlinearities and many kinds of noise and prior distributions. The mesh support and resolution are automatically adjusted and controlled using a few intuitive design parameters. The main disadvantage is that it cannot solve estimation problems of very high dimension since the computational complexity of the algorithm increases drastically with the dimension of the state space. The implementation used in this work shows real-time performance for 2D and in some cases 3D models, but higher state dimensions are usually intractable.