Discriminative Training of Kalman Filters

Kalman filters are a workhorse of robotics and are routinely used in state-estimation problems. However, their performance critically depends on a large number of modeling parameters which can be very difficult to obtain, and are often set via significant manual tweaking and at a great cost of engineering time. In this paper, we propose a method for automatically learning the noise parameters of a Kalman filter. We also demonstrate on a commercial wheeled rover that our Kalman filter’s learned noise covariance parameters—obtained quickly and fully automatically—significantly outperform an earlier, carefully and laboriously hand-designed one.