Design of colored-noise extended Kalman filter for vision-based navigation applications

Position, orientation and velocity of a vehicle is determined using line-of-sight measurements from a vision-based beacon system based on position sensing diode technology. For the thesis work, six beacon locations are assumed. A forty-eight state extended Kalman filter is designed to estimate the target position, orientation and velocity based on the line-of-sight measurements. Vibrational effects are added to the beacon locations and a colored-noise filter is designed to mitigate the effects of the beacon movements on state estimation. A sensitivity study is conducted for this thesis work, where the effects of beacon location errors on the estimation of a vehicle's position and attitude are examined. Beacon location variation is introduced into the standard vision-based navigation problem as second-order vibration noise. Further, an error in the covariance is assumed and its effect on the estimated quantity is observed. Different orders of vibration are added to the beacons position and the robustness properties of the colored-noise filter is analyzed.