Robust adaptive filter for shipborne kinematic positioning and velocity determination during the Baltic Sea experiment

Information on trajectory and attitude is essential for analyzing gravimetric data collected on kinematic platforms. Usually, a Kalman filter is used to obtain high-accuracy positional and velocity information. However, this can be affected by measurement outliers and by state disturbances that occur frequently under a fast-changing environment. To overcome these problems, a robust adaptive Kalman filtering algorithm is applied for state estimates, which introduces an equivalent weight to resist measurement outliers and an optimal adaptive factor to balance the contributions of the kinematic model information and the measurements. In addition to the conventional robust estimator, an improved Current Statistical (CS) model is proposed. The improved CS model adopts a variance adaptive learning algorithm, and it can perform self-adaptation of acceleration variance with the innovation information; thus, it can overcome the shortcoming of lower tracking accuracy and avoid setting the maximum acceleration. Following a gravimetry campaign on the Baltic Sea, it is shown in theory and in practice that the robust adaptive Kalman filter is not only simple in its calculation but also more reliable in controlling the colored observation noise and kinematic state disturbance compared with the classical Kalman filter. The improved CS model performs best, especially when analyzing the positioning errors at the turns due to the target maneuvering. Compared to the CS model, the RMS values of the positional estimates derived from the improved CS model decrease by almost 30% in the horizontal direction, and no significant improvement in the vertical direction is found.