METHOD FOR EVALUATING THE NAVIGATIONAL CONDITION IN THE CONDITIONS OF A LIMITED OBSERVANCE OPPORTUNITY

摘要

There is proposed a method of estimating a navigation state with several variables of a mobile carrier according to the extended Kalman filter method, comprising the steps of:—acquisition of measurements of at least one of the variables,—extended Kalman filtering (400) producing a current estimated state and a covariance matrix delimiting in the space of the navigation state a region of errors, with the help of a previous estimated state, of an observation matrix, of a transition matrix and of the measurements acquired, the method being characterized in that it comprises a step (310, 330) of adjustment of the transition matrix and of the observation matrix before their use in the extended Kalman filtering in such a way that the adjusted matrices satisfy an observability condition which depends on at least one of the variables of the state of the carrier, the observability condition being adjusted so as to prevent the Kalman filter from reducing the dimension of the region along at least one non-observable axis of the state space, in which the observability condition to be satisfied by the adjusted transition and observation matrices is the nullity of the kernel of an observability matrix associated therewith and in which the adjustment comprises the steps of:—calculation (301) of at least one primary basis of non-observable vectors with the help of the previous estimated state—for each matrix to be adjusted, calculation (306, 308) of at least one matrix deviation associated with the matrix with the help of the primary basis of vectors, shifting (330) of each matrix to be adjusted according to the matrix deviation associated therewith so as to satisfy the observability condition.