Federated filter for multi-sensor data fusion of dynamic positioning ship

High precision and a good capability of fault tolerant are more and more required for today´s dynamic positioning system. In this paper, a new kind of data fusion method is presented for the DP system by using federated filters and Unscented Kalman Filter technique. This method could overcome the single sensor´s weakness, and the UKF technique bring the algorithm with a good precision for nonlinear problem, while the federated structure significantly enhances the filters´ capability of multi-rate information fusion, fault tolerance, and system modularity.