Abstract: In the synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) movement measurement system, a movement estimation algorithm based on the M-estimator in the Kalman filter is introduced to improve its robustness against the external sensors data containing outliers with unbounded errors. Using the M-estimator to optimize parameters estimation, estimation errors are minimized under a class of Huber function, and unlike kalman filter estimation errors under norm-2 are minimized. Since the M-estimator is not sensitive to unbounded errors,it can effectively overcome the effect of unbounded errors,and numerical experiments illustrate that the proposed method can solve this problem of the estimation of the SAS’ movement.

Key words: synthetic aperture sonar, movement estimation, robust Kalman filter, M-estimate