A finite impulse response fixed-lag smoother for discrete-time nonlinear systems

In this paper, a finite impulse response(FIR) fixed-lag smoother is proposed for discrete-time nonlinear systems. If the actual state trajectory is sufficiently close to the nominal state trajectory, the nonlinear system model can be divided into two parts: The error-state model and the nominal model. The error state can be estimated by adapting the optimal time-varying FIR smoother to the error-state model, and the nominal state can be obtained directly from the nominal trajectory model. Moreover, in order to obtain more robust estimates, the linearization errors are considered as a linear function of the estimation errors. Since the proposed estimator has an FIR structure, the proposed smoother can be expected to have better estimation performance than the IIR-structured estimators in terms of robustness and fast convergence. Additionally the proposed method can give a more general solution than the optimal FIR filtering approach, since the optimal FIR smoother is reduced to the optimal FIR filter by setting the fixed-lag size as zero. To illustrate the performance of the proposed method, simulation results are presented by comparing the method with an optimal FIR filtering approach and linearized Kalman filter.