New fault-tolerant federated Kalman filters for integrated navigation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to achieve accurate integrated navigation results for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems even in the presence of possible navigation faults in the subsystems of the federated Kalman filter. Design/methodology/approach – The federated Kalman filter is modified from two aspects to get accurate navigation results under abnormity. First, time-variant vector distribution coefficients trading off the navigation accuracy and the observability degree of each state component are computed to replace the traditional scalar coefficients. Second, a fault-tolerant filter is proposed as the local navigation filter. Findings – Simulations for the navigation of a UAV system show that the proposed method can be applied for accurate navigation purpose even in the presence of subsystem navigation faults. Originality/value – New fault-tolerant federated Kalman filters for integrated navigation are presented to achieve accurate navigation solutions.