Laser Pointing and Tracking Using an Adaptive Extended Kalman Filter.

Abstract

An adaptive extended Kalman filter (EKF) is used in an Adaptive Laser Optics Techniques (ALOT) control loop to track the glint from a spherical target. A fourfold improvement in tracking bandwidth is obtained over a conventional conical scan ALOT tracking loop implemented with the same hardware. The increase in tracking bandwidth is manifested in the ratio between the (conical scan) dither frequency and the tracking bandwidth which is 2.5:1 for the EKF and 10:1 for the conventional analog or digital glint tracking schemes. The EKF provides correct pointing error estimates over essentially the entire range of the pointing error, whereas in a conventional conical scan loop the demodulated error versus true pointing error function is highly non-linear due to the nonlinearity of the glint.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1976
Accession Number
ADA035275

Entities

People

  • Zdzislaw H. Lewantowicz

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Algorithms
  • Automatic Gain Control
  • Ball Bearings
  • Closed Loop Systems
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Programming
  • Computers
  • Control Systems
  • Control Systems Engineering
  • Equations
  • Estimators
  • Filters
  • Geometry
  • Kalman Filters
  • Laser Beams
  • Mathematical Filters

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Image Processing and Computer Vision.
  • Phased Array Antenna Design.

Technology Areas

  • Directed Energy