A New Outlier-Robust Student's t Based Gaussian Approximate Filter for Cooperative Localization

In this paper, a new outlier-robust Student's t based Gaussian approximate filter is proposed to address the heavy-tailed process and measurement noises induced by the outlier measurements of velocity and range in cooperative localization of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The state vector, scale matrices, and degrees of freedom (DOF) parameters are jointly estimated based on the variational Bayesian approach by using the constructed Student's t based hierarchical Gaussian state-space model. The performances of the proposed filter and existing filters are tested in the cooperative localization of an AUV through a lake trial. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed filter has better localization accuracy and robustness than existing state-of-the-art outlier-robust filters.