Adaptive Invariant Extended Kalman Filter with Noise Covariance Tuning for Attitude Estimation

Attitude estimation is crucial in aerospace engineering, robotics, and virtual reality applications, but faces difficulties due to nonlinear system dynamics and sensor limitations. This paper addresses the challenge of attitude estimation using quaternion-based adaptive right invariant extended Kalman filtering (RI-EKF) that integrates data from inertial and magnetometer sensors. Our approach applies the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate noise covariance, exploiting RI-EKF symmetry properties. We analyze the adaptive RI-EKF's stability, convergence, and accuracy, validating its performance through simulations and comparison with the left invariant EKF. Monte Carlo simulations validate the effectiveness of our noise covariance estimation technique across various window lengths.

Robust Attitude Estimation with Quaternion Left-Invariant EKF and Noise Covariance Tuning

Accurate estimation of noise parameters is critical for optimal filter performance, especially in systems where true noise parameter values are unknown or time-varying. This article presents a quaternion left-invariant extended Kalman filter (LI-EKF) for attitude estimation, integrated with an adaptive noise covariance estimation algorithm. By employing an iterative expectation-maximization (EM) approach, the filter can effectively estimate both process and measurement noise covariances. Extensive simulations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of attitude estimation accuracy and robustness to initial parameter misspecification. The adaptive LI-EKF's ability to adapt to time-varying noise characteristics makes it a promising solution for various applications requiring reliable attitude estimation, such as aerospace, robotics, and autonomous systems.

RF-Enhanced Road Infrastructure for Intelligent Transportation

The EPC GEN 2 communication protocol for Ultra-high frequency Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has offered a promising avenue for advancing the intelligence of transportation infrastructure. With the capability of linking vehicles to RFID readers to crowdsource information from RFID tags on road infrastructures, the RF-enhanced road infrastructure (REI) can potentially transform data acquisition for urban transportation. Despite its potential, the broader adoption of RFID technologies in building intelligent roads has been limited by a deficiency in understanding how the GEN 2 protocol impacts system performance under different transportation settings. This paper fills this knowledge gap by presenting the system architecture and detailing the design challenges associated with REI. Comprehensive real-world experiments are conducted to assess REI's effectiveness across various urban contexts. The results yield crucial insights into the optimal design of on-vehicle RFID readers and on-road RFID tags, considering the constraints imposed by vehicle dynamics, road geometries, and tag placements. With the optimized designs of encoding schemes for reader-tag communication and on-vehicle antennas, REI is able to fulfill the requirements of traffic sign inventory management and environmental monitoring while falling short of catering to the demand for high-speed navigation. In particular, the Miller 2 encoding scheme strikes the best balance between reading performance (e.g., throughput) and noise tolerance for the multipath effect. Additionally, we show that the on-vehicle antenna should be oriented to maximize the available time for reading on-road tags, although it may reduce the received power by the tags in the forward link.