Determine when shared-heading fusion is beneficial

Determine under which observation configurations and environmental conditions shared-heading fusion of joint transmitter position--heading posteriors improves localization performance over alternative fusion strategies.

Background

MAGNETAR represents the transmitter state jointly in position and heading, allowing multiple observations to be fused while enforcing a common transmitter heading. The experiments report a substantial improvement in one measured example but only a modest average gain across 1,000 simulated fusion sets, leaving the conditions under which the shared-heading approximation is reliably beneficial unresolved.

The unresolved question is specifically when shared-heading fusion helps, rather than whether the fusion operation can be defined. The conclusion identifies this as future work alongside broader evaluation and system extensions.