The ability of the underwater vehicle to determine its precise position is vital to completing a mission successfully. Multi-sensor fusion methods for underwater vehicle positioning are commonly based on Kalman filtering, which requires the knowledge of process and measurement noise covariance. As the underwater conditions are continuously changing, incorrect process and measurement noise covariance affect the accuracy of position estimation and sometimes cause divergence. Furthermore, the underwater multi-path effect and nonlinearity cause outliers that have a significant impact on positional accuracy. These non-Gaussian outliers are difficult to handle with conventional Kalman-based methods and their fuzzy variants. To address these issues, this paper presents a new and improved adaptive multi-sensor fusion method by using information-theoretic, learning-based fuzzy rules for Kalman filter covariance adaptation in the presence of outliers. Two novel metrics are proposed by utilizing correntropy Gaussian and Versoria kernels for matching theoretical and actual covariance. Using correntropy-based metrics and fuzzy logic together makes the algorithm robust against outliers in nonlinear dynamic underwater conditions. The performance of the proposed sensor fusion technique is compared and evaluated using Monte-Carlo simulations, and substantial improvements in underwater position estimation are obtained.
Keywords: Kalman filtering; correntropy; fuzzy; multi-sensor fusion; positioning; underwater robotics; underwater vehicle.