COMPARISON OF 4 FILTERING OPTIONS FOR A RADAR TRACKING PROBLEM

Four different filtering options are considered for the problem of tra cking an exoatmospheric ballistic target with no maneuvers. The four f ilters are an alpha-beta filter, an augmented alpha-beta filter, a dec oupled Kalman filter, and a fully coupled extended Kalman filter. Thes e filters are listed in the order of increasing computational complexi ty. All of the filters can track the target with some degree of accura cy. Although the pure alpha-beta filter appreciably lags the other fil ters in performance for this problem, its augmented version is very co mpetitive with the extended Kalman filter under benign conditions. Per haps the most surprising result is that under all conditions examined, the decoupled (linear) Kalman filter, which is at least an order of m agnitude less computationally complex than We fully coupled extended K alman filter, performs essentially the same as the extended Kalman fil ter.