Variational Bayesian-Based Moving Horizon Estimation of Toolface for Rotary Steerable Drilling Tool Systems

This article is concerned with the estimation problem of Toolface for dynamic point-the-bit rotary steerable drilling tool systems. First, considering the unknown frequency and amplitude of vibration during the drilling process, the Toolface system is modeled as a time-varying stochastic system with unknown and time-varying noise covariance matrices. Under the assumption that the noises and their covariance matrices, respectively, obey the Gaussian distribution and the inverse Wishart distribution, the variational Bayesian-based moving horizon estimation algorithm is proposed. Then, the state and the noise covariance matrices are inferred by iteratively updating their approximate posterior probability distributions. Finally, simulations and experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the developed estimation scheme.