Event-triggered Extended Kalman Filter for UAV Monitoring System

Abstract

To facilitate ground station monitoring and command uploading, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) need to frequently exchange individual state data between units. However, this results in a significant usage of communication bandwidth. To address this issue, on the basis of an event-triggered strategy, this paper proposes an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). aimed at reducing the communication burden of UAVs while maintaining high accuracy. Specifically, a state measurement triggered by an event is selected for filtering only if it contains innovation, thereby reducing the amount of data that needs to be communicated. Since UAV systems are nonlinear, EKF is adopted to fully utilize the information obtained from event-triggered strategies, thereby enhancing the estimation performance. In this paper, a physical UAV was used to verify the proposed algorithm, and it proved to have robust dynamic performance and to effectively reduce the communication rate.