Nonlinear Kalman Filters and Particle Filters for integrated navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles

The paper studies and compares nonlinear Kalman Filtering methods and Particle Filtering methods for estimating the state vector of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) through the fusion of sensor measurements. Next, the paper proposes the use of the estimated state vector in a control loop for autonomous navigation and trajectory tracking by the UAVs. The proposed nonlinear controller is derived according to the flatness-based control theory. The estimation of the UAV's state vector is carried out with the use of (i) Extended Kalman Filtering (EKF), (ii) Sigma-Point Kalman Filtering (SPKF), (iii) Particle Filtering (PF), and (iv) a new nonlinear estimation method which is the Derivative-free nonlinear Kalman Filtering (DKF). The performance of the nonlinear control loop which is based on these nonlinear state estimation methods is evaluated through simulation tests. Comparing the aforementioned filtering methods in terms of estimation accuracy and computation speed, it is shown that the Sigma-Point Kalman Filtering is a reliable and computationally efficient approach to state estimation-based control, while Particle Filtering is well-suited to accommodate non-Gaussian measurements. Moreover, it is shown that the Derivative-free nonlinear Kalman Filter is faster than the rest of the nonlinear filters while also succeeding accurate, in terms of variance, state estimates. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.