Application of Out-of-Sequence measurement Unscented Filtering in Decentralized Naval Ships Cooperative Engagement

Measurements can arrive in different decentralized tracker at out-of-sequence due to the sensor diversity, unsteady pre-processing times of observed data and communication delays in naval cooperative engagement. So far, most of existing solutions to this problem are based on retrodiction, linear model and central processing. To increase the performance of maneuvering target tracking and fusion with out-of-sequence measurements three efforts are made. First, a decentralized fusion architecture based on geodetic coordinate system for naval ships was presented. Second, by combining the square-root unscented Kalman filter methodology and decorrelation approach in the information filter framework, a nonlinear forward-prediction out-of-sequence filtering algorithm is developed. Third, a decentralized fusion algorithm for the naval ships is proposed. The proposed algorithm can unify tracking and fusion algorithms in short range, intermediate range and long-distance circumstances. The comparison of the simulation results shows that the presented algorithms enhance the estimation accuracy for the nonlinear out-of-sequence measurement.