21,352 research outputs found
Batch Nonlinear Continuous-Time Trajectory Estimation as Exactly Sparse Gaussian Process Regression
In this paper, we revisit batch state estimation through the lens of Gaussian
process (GP) regression. We consider continuous-discrete estimation problems
wherein a trajectory is viewed as a one-dimensional GP, with time as the
independent variable. Our continuous-time prior can be defined by any
nonlinear, time-varying stochastic differential equation driven by white noise;
this allows the possibility of smoothing our trajectory estimates using a
variety of vehicle dynamics models (e.g., `constant-velocity'). We show that
this class of prior results in an inverse kernel matrix (i.e., covariance
matrix between all pairs of measurement times) that is exactly sparse
(block-tridiagonal) and that this can be exploited to carry out GP regression
(and interpolation) very efficiently. When the prior is based on a linear,
time-varying stochastic differential equation and the measurement model is also
linear, this GP approach is equivalent to classical, discrete-time smoothing
(at the measurement times); when a nonlinearity is present, we iterate over the
whole trajectory to maximize accuracy. We test the approach experimentally on a
simultaneous trajectory estimation and mapping problem using a mobile robot
dataset.Comment: Submitted to Autonomous Robots on 20 November 2014, manuscript #
AURO-D-14-00185, 16 pages, 7 figure
Data Assimilation by Conditioning on Future Observations
Conventional recursive filtering approaches, designed for quantifying the
state of an evolving uncertain dynamical system with intermittent observations,
use a sequence of (i) an uncertainty propagation step followed by (ii) a step
where the associated data is assimilated using Bayes' rule. In this paper we
switch the order of the steps to: (i) one step ahead data assimilation followed
by (ii) uncertainty propagation. This route leads to a class of filtering
algorithms named \emph{smoothing filters}. For a system driven by random noise,
our proposed methods require the probability distribution of the driving noise
after the assimilation to be biased by a nonzero mean. The system noise,
conditioned on future observations, in turn pushes forward the filtering
solution in time closer to the true state and indeed helps to find a more
accurate approximate solution for the state estimation problem
Data Assimilation: A Mathematical Introduction
These notes provide a systematic mathematical treatment of the subject of
data assimilation
- …