Measurement Noise Covariance-Adapting Kalman Filters for Varying Sensor Noise Situations

An accurate and reliable positioning system (PS) is a significant topic of research due to its broad range of aerospace applications, such as the localization of autonomous agents in GPS-denied and indoor environments. The PS discussed in this work uses ultra-wide band (UWB) sensors to provide distance measurements. UWB sensors are based on radio frequency technology and offer low power consumption, wide bandwidth, and precise ranging in the presence of nominal environmental noise. However, in practical situations, UWB sensors experience varying measurement noise due to unexpected obstacles in the environment. The localization accuracy is highly dependent on the filtering of such noise, and the extended Kalman filter (EKF) is one of the widely used techniques. In varying noise situations, where the obstacles generate larger measurement noise than nominal levels, EKF cannot offer precise results. Therefore, this work proposes two approaches based on EKF: sequential adaptive EKF and piecewise adaptive EKF. Simulation studies are conducted in static, linear, and nonlinear scenarios, and it is observed that higher accuracy is achieved by applying the proposed approaches as compared to the traditional EKF method.