Comparison between the unscented Kalman filter and the extended Kalman filter for the position estimation module of an integrated navigation information system

An integrated navigation information system must know continuously the current position with a good precision. The required performance of the positioning module is achieved by using a cluster of heterogeneous sensors whose measurements are fused. The most popular data fusion method for positioning problems is the extended Kalman filter. The extended Kalman filter is a variation of the Kalman filter used to solve non-linear problems. Recently, an improvement to the extended Kalman filter has been proposed, the unscented Kalman filter. This paper describes an empirical analysis evaluating the performances of the unscented Kalman filter and comparing them with the extended Kalman filter's performances.