Quantized feedback particle filter for unmanned aerial vehicles tracking with quantized measurements

Many existing state estimation approaches assume that the measurement noise of sensors is Gaussian. However, in unmanned aerial vehicles tracking applications with distributed passive radar array, the measurements suffer from quantization noise due to limited communication bandwidth. In this paper, a novel state estimation algorithm referred to as the quantized feedback particle filter is proposed to solve unmanned aerial vehicles tracking with quantized measurements, which is an improvement of the feedback particle filter (FPF) for the case of quantization noise. First, a bearing-only quantized measurement model is presented based on the midriser quantizer. The relationship between quantized measurements and original measurements is analyzed. By assuming that the quantization satisfies Δ ≤ 2 σ ω , Sheppard’s correction is used for calculating the variances of the measurement noise. Then, a set of controlled particles is used to approximate the posterior distribution. To cope with the quantization noise of passive radars, a new formula of the gain matrix is derived by modifying the measurement noise covariance. Finally, a typical two-passive radar unmanned aerial vehicles tracking scenario is performed by QFPF and compared with the three other algorithms. Simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm.