Airspeed Estimation of Course Correction Munitions by Using Extended Kalman Filter

This paper represents a filter design to estimate the airspeed of a spin-stabilized, trajectory-correctible artillery ammunition. Due to the limited power and space in operational point of view, the airspeed sensor is not installed, and thus the airspeed need to be estimated using limited sensor measurements. The only IMU measurements(three-axis specific forces and angular rates) are used in this application. The extended Kalman filter algorithm is applied since a linear filter can not cover the its wide operational range in airspeed and altitude. In the implementation of the EKF, the state and measurement equations are transformed into the no-roll frame for simple form of Jacobian matrix. The simulation study is conducted to evaluate the performance of the filter under various environment conditions of sensor noise and wind turbulence. In addition, the effect of the choice in filter design parameters, i.e. process error covariance matrices is analyzed on the performance of the estimation of airspeed and angular rates.