Robust Unscented Kalman Filter Research Articles

Pico satellite attitude estimation via Robust Unscented Kalman Filter in the presence of measurement faults

In the normal operation conditions of a pico satellite, a conventional Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) gives sufficiently good estimation results. However, if the measurements are not reliable because of any kind of malfunction in the estimation system, UKF gives inaccurate results and diverges by time. This study introduces Robust Unscented Kalman Filter (RUKF) algorithms with the filter gain correction for the case of measurement malfunctions. By the use of defined variables named as measurement noise scale factor, the faulty measurements are taken into consideration with a small weight, and the estimations are corrected without affecting the characteristics of the accurate ones. Two different RUKF algorithms, one with single scale factor and one with multiple scale factors, are proposed and applied for the attitude estimation process of a pico satellite. The results of these algorithms are compared for different types of measurement faults in different estimation scenarios and recommendations about their applications are given.

Robust unscented Kalman filtering for nonlinear uncertain systems

AbstractA derivative‐free robust Kalman filter algorithm is proposed for nonlinear uncertain systems. The unscented transform (UT) is adopted instead of the linearization technique to obtain the solution of the H∞ filter Riccati equation. A robust unscented Kalman filter (RUKF) is derived to guarantee an optimized upper bound on the estimation error covariance despite the model uncertainties and the approximation error of the UT. The proposed algorithm is applied to a satellite attitude determination system. Simulation results show that the RUKF is more effective than the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) in cases where alignment errors are present. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society