Maximum Correntropy Based Unscented Particle Filter for Cooperative Navigation with Heavy-Tailed Measurement Noises

In this paper, a novel robust particle filter is proposed to address the measurement outliers occurring in the multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) based cooperative navigation (CN). As compared with the classic unscented particle filter (UPF) based on Gaussian assumption of measurement noise, the proposed robust particle filter based on the maximum correntropy criterion (MCC) exhibits better robustness against heavy-tailed measurement noises that are often induced by measurement outliers in CN systems. Furthermore, the proposed robust particle filter is computationally much more efficient than existing robust UPF due to the use of a Kullback-Leibler distance-resampling to adjust the number of particles online. Experimental results based on actual lake trial show that the proposed maximum correntropy based unscented particle filter (MCUPF) has better estimation accuracy than existing state-of-the-art robust filters for CN systems with heavy-tailed measurement noises, and the proposed MCUPF has lower computational complexity than existing robust particle filters.