Performance Analysis of Three Predictors for Mitigating Input and Output Time Delays

This paper presents a novel extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based nonlinear predictor—the extended Kalman predictor (EKP)—and compares its performance with two linear predictors, the Smith predictor (SP) and the Kalman predictor (KP). A motivating application is telerobotic operation using a predictive display that requires knowledge of the robot pose despite time delays at the input and the output. The paper provides the mathematical formulation of the EKP, as well as the two linear predictors, and demonstrates their use for the simulated flight of a small, fixed-wing uncrewed air vehicle. The EKP performs comparably to the KP when the aircraft motion experiences small perturbations from a nominal trajectory, but the EKP outperforms the KP for larger excursions. The SP performs poorly in every case.