The quality of kinematic navigation and positioning depends on the quality of the model describing the vehicle movements and the reliability of the observations. An adaptive Kalman filtering is introduced. Three kinds of adaptive factors based on the discrepancy between the geometrical positions and the kinematic model predictions and a variance component ratio between model predictions and observations are described. A new exponential adaptive factor is established. The theoretical curves of the adaptive factors are drawn and a practical example is given. The errors of four adaptive filtering results and the corresponding curves of the adaptive factors are also drawn. It is shown, by comparison and analysis, that all of the four adaptive factors can control the influences of the vehicle disturbances in movements on the navigation results. The results derived by the adaptive factor constructed by the variance component ratio are slightly better than those derived by other adaptive factors.
