An Improved Adaptive Robust Extended Kalman Filter for Arctic Shipborne Tightly Coupled GNSS/INS Navigation

In the Arctic region, the navigation and positioning accuracy of shipborne and autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) integrated Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and Inertial Navigation System (INS) solutions is severely degraded due to poor satellite geometry, frequent ionospheric disturbances, non-Gaussian measurement noise, and strong multipath effects, as well as long-term INS-based dead-reckoning for AUVs when GNSS is unavailable underwater. In addition, the sparse ground-based augmentation infrastructure and the lack of reliable reference trajectories and dedicated test ranges in polar waters hinder the validation and performance assessment of existing marine navigation systems, further complicating the achievement of accurate and reliable navigation in this region. To improve the positioning accuracy of the GNSS/INS shipborne navigation system, this paper adopts a tightly coupled GNSS/INS navigation approach. To further enhance the accuracy and robustness of tightly coupled GNSS/INS positioning, this paper proposes an improved Adaptive Robust Extended Kalman Filter (IAREKF) algorithm to effectively suppress the effects of gross errors and non-Gaussian noise, thereby significantly enhancing the system’s robustness and positioning accuracy. First, the residuals and Mahalanobis distance are calculated using the Adaptive Robust Extended Kalman Filter (AREKF), and the chi-square test is used to assess the anomalies of the observations. Subsequently, the observation noise covariance matrix is dynamically adjusted to improve the filter’s anti-interference capability in the complex Arctic environment. However, the state estimation accuracy of AREKF is still affected by GNSS signal degradation, leading to a decrease in navigation and positioning accuracy. To further improve the robustness and positioning accuracy of the filter, this paper introduces a sliding window mechanism, which dynamically adjusts the observation noise covariance matrix using historical residual information, thereby effectively improving the system’s stability in harsh environments. Field experiments conducted on an Arctic survey vessel demonstrate that the proposed improved adaptive robust extended Kalman filter significantly enhances the robustness and accuracy of Arctic integrated navigation. In the Arctic voyages at latitudes 80.3° and 85.7°, compared to the Loosely coupled EKF, the proposed method reduced the horizontal root mean square error by 61.78% and 21.7%, respectively.