An experimental comparative study of adaptive sigma-point Kalman filters: Case study of a rigid–flexible four-bar linkage mechanism and a servo-hydraulic actuator

This paper investigates the application, design, and implementation of different adaptive sigma-point Kalman filters for nonlinear dynamic systems. It is a well-known fact that the performance of nonlinear Kalman filters depends on a prior knowledge of system noise statistics. In real-time applications, this knowledge is difficult and in some cases impossible to predefine. Therefore, an adaptation mechanism based on the random weighting method is proposed in this work to estimate, simultaneously, noise covariance and the state of the system. On the other hand, for real time execution, the computational efficiency of such filters should also be considered to minimize the burden on computational resources. Based on these two factors, in this paper, four different variants of the adaptive sigma-point Kalman filter are studied in detail: (I) an Adaptive Unscented Kalman filter (AUKF), (II) an Adaptive Square-root Unscented Kalman filter (ASr-UKF) with an Unscented Transformation sigma-point selection strategy, (III) an Adaptive Scaled Spherical Simplex Unscented Kalman filter (AS3UKF), and (IV) an Adaptive Square-root Scaled Spherical Simplex Unscented Kalman filter (ASr-S3UKF) with scaled spherical simplex sigma-point selection strategy. The performance of these adaptive sigma-point Kalman filters is analyzed here in depth and discussed for application to a simulated rigid–flexible four-bar linkage mechanism and a practical servo-hydraulic actuator setup under different scenarios. The simulation and the experimental results indicated that, for the cases studied in this article, the filters are competitive and present advantages and disadvantages that should be dealt with according to the requirements of the problem.