Systolic Array for Parallel Solution of the Robust Kalman Filter Used for Attitude and Position Estimations in UAVs

The efficient Kalman filter has been widely used in recent decades to obtain air navigation information in UAVs. However, for a good performance of the Kalman filter, the model that describes the system dynamics must not contain uncertainties. This paper presents the implementation of a robust Kalman filter to estimate the attitude, velocity, and position of UAVs. The robust filter considers uncertainties in the sensor models. A mathematical structure based on the solution of linear systems synthesizes the predictor-corrector robust estimation algorithm. The main contribution of this study is the proposed QR decomposition based on Givens rotation to solve the linear system. The simulated experiments used sensory data collected in Zürich-Switzerland and ground truth referencing attitude, velocity, and position. The offline simulation results express the effectiveness of the robust Kalman filter for this application, with a reduction of up to 18.9% in the estimation error, in relation to the standard Kalman filter. The proposal to use systolic arrays for numerical solutions has shown promise for implementation in parallel processing platforms, such as FPGAs.