Sinusoidal Disturbance Rejection with Application to Helicopter Flight Data Estimation

This paper is concerned with the problem of eliminating sinusoidal disturbances from data while producing minimal distortion to the underlying data. A particular example of this problem arises in the filtering of helicopter data which are corrupted by sinusoidal disturbances due to rotor motion. It is shown that an optimal solution to the problem can be found using Kalman filtering theory. The properties of the optimal filter are analyzed using recent results on filtering for nonstabilizable systems. These results are then used to motivate a particular near-optimal filter which has enhanced robustness properties relative to the optimal filter. It will also be shown that an identical filter can be derived using recent results on the evaluation of recursive discrete Fourier transforms. This link between time and frequency domain methods leads to a rather complete understanding of the characteristics of the filter. Specific results are presented showing the application of the filter to real helicopter data. © 1986 IEEE