Ballistic Filter for GPS and Accelerometer Measurements

Ballistic filtering describes the dynamic equations that can be used to form Extended Kalman Filters (EKF) for the estimation of a projectile’s trajectory. The steps associated with initialization and implementing an EKF are demonstrated through a specific task. The performance of an EKF processing Global Positioning System (GPS) observation is compared to the performance of an EKF processing both GPS and axial accelerometer observations. Hit point prediction error is used as the measure of effectiveness. Both filters use the same dynamics for state and covariance propagation.