Abstract-A framework for positioning, navigation and tracking problems using particle filters (sequential Monte Carlo methods) is developed. It consists of a class of motion models and a general non-linear measurement equation in position. A general algorithm is presented, which is parsimonious with the particle dimension. It is based on marginalization, enabling a Kalman filter to estimate all position derivatives, and the particle filter becomes low-dimensional. This is of utmost importance for highperformance real-time applications.Automotive and airborne applications illustrate numerically the advantage over classical Kalman filter based algorithms. Here the use of non-linear models and non-Gaussian noise is the main explanation for the improvement in accuracy.More specifically, we describe how the technique of map matching is used to match an aircraft's elevation profile to a digital elevation map, and a car's horizontal driven path to a street map. In both cases, real-time implementations are available, and tests have shown that the accuracy in both cases is comparable to satellite navigation (as GPS), but with higher integrity. Based on simulations, we also argue how the particle filter can be used for positioning based on cellular phone measurements, for integrated navigation in aircraft, and for target tracking in aircraft and cars. Finally, the particle filter enables a promising solution to the combined task of navigation and tracking, with possible application to airborne hunting and collision avoidance systems in cars.

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Abstract-The particle filter offers a general numerical tool to approximate the posterior density function for the state in nonlinear and non-Gaussian filtering problems. While the particle filter is fairly easy to implement and tune, its main drawback is that it is quite computer intensive, with the computational complexity increasing quickly with the state dimension. One remedy to this problem is to marginalize out the states appearing linearly in the dynamics. The result is that one Kalman filter is associated with each particle. The main contribution in this paper is the derivation of the details for the marginalized particle filter for a general nonlinear state-space model. Several important special cases occurring in typical signal processing applications will also be discussed. The marginalized particle filter is applied to an integrated navigation system for aircraft. It is demonstrated that the complete high-dimensional system can be based on a particle filter using marginalization for all but three states. Excellent performance on real flight data is reported.

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The particle filter (PF) was introduced in 1993 as a numerical approximation to the nonlinear Bayesian filtering problem, and there is today a rather mature theory as well as a number of successful applications described in literature. This tutorial serves two purposes: to survey the part of the theory that is most important for applications and to survey a number of illustrative positioning applications from which conclusions relevant for the theory can be drawn.