A survey on outlier-resistant state estimation and its applications

The research on outlier-resistant methods in state estimation has drawn considerable interests over the past several decades. This is mainly due to the general existence of measurement outliers and the serious distortion property in state estimation. To achieve a satisfactory estimation accuracy, it is of great significance to study the outlier-resistant state estimation schemes for different systems. Remarkable progress has been made in recent years on the theoretical and application of outlier-resistant state estimation. In this article, a timely and systematic review is proposed concerning the outlier-resistant state estimation problem and its applications. The main differences between measurement noises and measurement outliers are first introduced. Then, the recent results are summarized according to the underlying outlier-resistant state estimation schemes. Subsequently, some typical applications of outlier-resistant state estimation are provided. Moreover, several research challenging issues of outlier-resistant state estimation are discussed. Finally, some future research topics are outlined in the conclusion part.