Decoupled Kalman filters for phased array radar tracking

Kalman filters have been used in numerous phased array radars to track satellites, reentry vehicles, and missiles. This paper considers the design of these filters to reduce computational requirements, ill-conditioning, and the effects of nonlinearities. Several special coordinate systems used to represent the Kalman filter error covariance matrix are described. These covariance coordinates facilitate the approximate decoupling required for practical filter design. A tutorial discussion and analysis of ill-conditioning in Kalman filters is used to motivate these design considerations. This analysis also explains several well-known phenomena reported in the literature. In addition, a discussion of nonlinearities and methods to mitigate their ill effects is included.