Robust UKF orbit determination method with time-varying forgetting factor for angle/range-based integrated navigation system

The angle/range-based integrated navigation system is a favorable navigation solution for deep space explorers. However, the statistical characteristics of the measurement noise are time-varying, leading to inaccuracies in the derived measurement covariance even causing filter divergence. To reduce the gap between theoretical and actual covariances, some adaptive methods use empirically determined and unchanged forgetting factors to scale innovations within the sliding window. However, the constant weighting sequence cannot accurately adapt to the time-varying measurement noise in dynamic processes. Therefore, this paper proposes an Adaptive Robust Unscented Kalman Filter with Time-varying forgetting factors (TFF-ARUKF) for the angle/range integrated navigation system. Firstly, based on a statistically linear regression model approximating the nonlinear measurement model, the M-estimator is adopted to suppress the interference of outliers. Secondly, the covariance matching method is combined with the Huber linear regression problem to adaptively adjust the measurement noise covariance used in the M-estimation. Thirdly, to capture the time-varying characteristics of the measurement noise in each estimation, a new time-varying forgetting factors selection strategy is designed to dynamically adjust the adaptive matrix used in the covariance matching method. Simulations and experimental analysis compared with EKF, AMUKF, ARUKF, and Student’s t-based methods have validated the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm.