Application of an input estimation technique to determine the acceleration of a maneuvering vehicle

In this paper we describe the application of an input estimation technique to the problem of inferring the acceleration of a maneuvering target from noise-corrupted position measurements. The input estimation algorithm computes the maximum aposteriori probability (MAP) estimate of the input given the measurements. Results obtained using the algorithm, including those obtained using data for an M60 tank from the ATMT field tests conducted by the U.S. Army, are presented.