Recent Particle Filter Applied to Terrain Navigation

A recent particle method, the Local Regularized Rejection Particle Filter L2RPF is applied here in terrain navigation. An aircraft measures periodically the relative elevation. By means of a digital elevation map, the goal is to estimate the absolute position and velocity of the aircraft. Moreover, an inertial navigation system (INS) drives the generation of the particles (fusion of L2RPF and the INS). The conditional density of the state is recursively estimated. The proposed filter allows a precise correction step in a given computational time. For this problem, the Kalman filter is inadapted (multimodality) and batch methods are expensive (grid methods in a 6-dimentional state space).