  Many sensors, such as range, sonar, radar, GPS and visual devices, produce
measurements which are contaminated by outliers. This problem can be addressed
by using fat-tailed sensor models, which account for the possibility of
outliers. Unfortunately, all estimation algorithms belonging to the family of
Gaussian filters (such as the widely-used extended Kalman filter and unscented
Kalman filter) are inherently incompatible with such fat-tailed sensor models.
The contribution of this paper is to show that any Gaussian filter can be made
compatible with fat-tailed sensor models by applying one simple change: Instead
of filtering with the physical measurement, we propose to filter with a pseudo
measurement obtained by applying a feature function to the physical
measurement. We derive such a feature function which is optimal under some
conditions. Simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively
handle measurement outliers and allows for robust filtering in both linear and
nonlinear systems.
