A novel deformation estimation method based on Robust Student's t Kalman filter

In the severe maneuver of carriers, such as ship and aircraft, the large deformation may be induced, which will cause large errors in the transfer alignment of weapon system or the motion parameter estimation of synthetical earth observing system such as aerial mapping equipment and synthetic aperture radar. Conventional deformation model based on the second-order Gauss-Markov process with Gaussian noise will meet much restraint in practice environment. To solve the issue of non-Gaussian distributed process and measurement noises within the deformation model, this paper presented a novel Robust Student's t Kalman filter based deformation estimation method. By using the measurement information of inertial sensors, a high-precision deformation estimation is able to be achieved. The mathematical simulation results could reveal the accuracy of deformation estimation based on our proposed method comparing with conventional method.