Contingency Estimation of States for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle using a Spherical Simplex Unscented Filter

Aiming at survival from contingency situations for unmanned aerial vehicles, a square root spherical simplex unscented Kalman filter is applied for state and parameter estimation and a rough model is used for state prediction when essential measurements are lost. Processing real flight data, received by telemetry at quite low sampling rate, the paper shows that filter performance of reasonable quality can be achieved despite the low sampling rate and the result is a low order model that can be useful during contingency operation.

It is shown that the filter-estimator approach can cope with the low rate measurements requiring very little system knowledge and very limited tuning efforts. A generic aircraft model is utilised as process model where the non dimensional coefficients are identified online with joint estimation of states.

Numerical stability is guaranteed by mathematically efficient square root implementation of the filter algorithm. A case of loss of GPS signal demonstrates the use of the state estimates to obtain return of the UAV to close to it’s home base where safe recovery is possible.