An Application of Kalman Techniques to Aircraft and Missile Radar Tracking

Abstract

A real-time and postflight data reduction and error analysis program is developed with the ability to estimate either aircraft flight paths or missile trajectories with the same state vector and matrix dimension filter equations simply by input selection of the appropriate state transition matrix. A feature of the filter formulation is an analytical technique for computing the effects of measurement error parameters not explicitly included in the filter state vector on both the state vector estimate itself and the state covariance matrix. Examples of the processing of real tracking data for aircraft flight paths, missile trajectories, and some other more unusual applications are presented which illustrate both the data reduction and error analysis modes of program operation.