Fully Distributed Observer Design for Mobile Targets

In this paper, a sensor network is used to implement the distributed observer design problem for a linear time-invariant mobile target system with constant or time-varying velocity. Each sensor can only access a part of the output information of the target. Two types of interacting dynamics are endowed to each sensor, one is a consensus-based algorithm for the state estimation using the local measurements, while the other is a leader-following flocking-like algorithm such that the mobile sensors can avoid collision, maintain communication, and track the target. By adopting adaptive coupling gains on the consensus-based term in the state estimation algorithm, a fully distributed observer which is independent of the communication topology associated with the sensor network is constructed. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed theoretical results.