Theoretical Approach of Development of Tracking Module for ARPA system on Board Warships

The maritime industry is expanding at an alarming rate and as such there is a perpetual need to improve situation awareness in the maritime environment using new and emerging technology. Tracking is one of the numerous ways of enhancing situation awareness by providing information that may be useful to the operator. The tracking system described herein comprises determining existing states of own ship, state prediction and state compensation caused by random noise. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the process of tracking and develop a tracking algorithm by using ${\alpha}-{\beta}-{\gamma}$ tracking filter under a random noise or irregular motion for use in a warship. The algorithm involves initializing the input parameters of position, velocity and course. The actual positions are then computed for each time interval. In addition, a weighted difference of the observed and predicted position at the nth observation is added to the predicted position to obtain the smoothed position. This estimation is subsequently employed to determine the predicted position at (n+1). The smoothed values, predicted values and the observed values are used to compute the twice distance root mean square (2drms) error as a measure of accuracy of the tracking module.