Trial-and-error or avoiding a guess? Initialization of the Kalman filter

Abstract As a recursive state estimation algorithm, the Kalman filter (KF) assumes initial state distribution is known a priori, while in practice the initial distribution is commonly treated as design parameters. In this paper, we will answer three questions concerning initialization: (1) At each time step, how does the KF respond to measurements, control signals, and more importantly, initial states? (2) What is the price (in terms of accuracy) one has to pay if inaccurate initial states are used? and (3) Can we find a better strategy rather than through guessing to improve the performance of KF in the initial estimation phase when the initial condition is unknown? To these ends, the classical recursive KF is first transformed into an equivalent but batch form, from which the responses of the KF to measurements, control signal, and initial state can be clearly separated and observed. Based on this, we isolate the initial distribution by dividing the original state into two parts and reconstructing a new state-space model. An initialization algorithm is then proposed by employing the Bayesian inference technique to estimate all the unknown variables simultaneously. By analyzing its performance, an improved version is further developed. Two simulation examples demonstrate that the proposed initialization approaches can be considered as competitive alternatives of various existing initialization methods when initial condition is unknown.