Dynamic displacement estimation by fusing biased high-sampling rate acceleration and low-sampling rate displacement measurements using two-stage Kalman estimator

Abstract

In this paper, dynamic displacement is estimated with high accuracy by blending high-sampling rate acceleration data with low-sampling rate displacement measurement using a two-stage Kalman estimator. In Stage 1, the two-stage Kalman estimator first approximates dynamic displacement. Then, the estimator in Stage 2 estimates a bias with high accuracy and refines the displacement estimate from Stage 1. In the previous Kalman filter based displacement techniques, the estimation accuracy can deteriorate due to (1) the discontinuities produced when the estimate is adjusted by displacement measurement and (2) slow convergence at the beginning of estimation. To resolve these drawbacks, the previous techniques adopt smoothing techniques, which involve additional future measurements in the estimation. However, the smoothing techniques require more computational time and resources and hamper real-time estimation. The proposed technique addresses the drawbacks of the previous techniques without smoothing. The performance of the proposed technique is verified under various dynamic loading, sampling rate and noise level conditions via a series of numerical simulations and experiments. Its performance is also compared with those of the existing Kalman filter based techniques