Algorithm and Parallel Implementation of Particle Filtering and its Use in Waveform-Agile Sensing

Sequential Monte Carlo particle filters (PFs) are useful for estimating nonlinear non-Gaussian dynamic system parameters. As these algorithms are recursive, their real-time implementation can be computationally complex. In this paper, we analyze the bottlenecks in existing parallel PF algorithms, and propose a new approach that integrates parallel PFs with independent Metropolis–Hastings (PPF-IMH) resampling algorithms to improve root mean-squared estimation error (RMSE) performance. We implement the new PPF-IMH algorithm on a Xilinx Virtex-5 field programmable gate array (FPGA) platform. For a one-dimensional problem with 1,000 particles, the PPF-IMH architecture with four processing elements uses less than 5% of a Virtex-5 FPGA’s resource and takes 5.85 μs for one iteration. We also incorporate waveform-agile tracking techniques into the PPF-IMH algorithm. We demonstrate a significant performance improvement when the waveform is adaptively designed at each time step with 6.84 μs FPGA processing time per iteration.