A Robust Terrain Aided Navigation Using the Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filter Trained by Long Short-Term Memory Networks

Terrain-aided navigation (TAN) is a technology that estimates the position of the vehicle by comparing the altitude measured by an altimeter and height from the digital elevation model (DEM). The particle filter (PF)-based TAN has been commonly used to obtain stable real-time navigation solutions in cases where the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operates at a high altitude. Even though TAN performs well on rough and unique terrains, its performance degrades in flat and repetitive terrains. In particular, in the case of PF-based TAN, there has been no verified technique for deciding its terrain validity. Therefore, this study designed a Rao-Blackwellized PF (RBPF)-based TAN, used long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to endure flat and repetitive terrains, and trained the noise covariances and measurement model of RBPF. LSTM is a modified recurrent neural network (RNN), which is an artificial neural network that recognizes patterns from time series data. Using this, this study tuned the noise covariances and measurement model of RBPF to minimize the navigation errors in various flight trajectories. This paper designed a TAN algorithm based on combining RBPF and LSTM and confirmed that it can enable a more precise navigation performance than conventional RBPF based TAN through simulations.