Simulation-based optimal design of α-β-γ-δ filter

The existing third-order tracker known as α-β-γ filter has been used for target tracking and predicting for years. The filter can track the target's position and velocity, but not the acceleration. To extend its capability, a new fourth-order target tracker called α-β-γ-δ filter is proposed. The main objective of this study was to find the optimal set of filter parameters that leads to minimum position tracking errors. The tracking errors between using the α-β-γ filter and the α-β-γ-δ filter are compared. As a result, the new filter exhibits significant improvement in position tracking accuracy over the existing third-order filter, but at the expense of computational time in search of the optimal filter. To reduce the computational time, a simulation-based optimization technique via Taguchi method is introduced. © 2010 Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.