Dottorato di Ricerca in
Ingegneria dell'Informazione
Kalman Filtering: theory & applications
Abstract
This short course aims to provide both theoretical and practical tools to tackle estimation problems encountered in several areas of engineering and science.
In particular, it is shown how to formulate such estimation problems as instances of a general dynamical system state estimation problem and how to derive the mathematical solution of the latter problem.
Then it is shown that, for a linear Gaussian system, such a solution yields the well known Kalman filter. Further, approximate techniques (e.g. extended and unscented Kalman filters, particle filter, etc.) are presented for the case of nonlinear and/or non-Gaussian systems, for which an exact closed-form solution cannot be found.
To conclude the theoretical part, theoretical limitations (i.e. the Cramer-Rao lower bound) on the quality of estimation are discussed. In the second part of the course, we illustrate some applications of linear/nonlinear Kalman filtering (e.g., tracking, robotic navigation, environmental data assimilation) and present some recent research developments on distributed estimation by wireless sensor networks.