Distributed PLKF using delayed information sharing for 3D AOA target tracking

This paper investigates the problem of distributed angle-of-arrival (AOA) target tracking in 3D space using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Because of communication constraints arising from distance and bandwidth constraints in a distributed UAV system, some UAVs may not be able to share their information with all other UAVs. This will lead to reduced tracking performance. In order to improve the estimation performance, a 3D distributed pseudolinear Kalman filter (DPLKF) using delayed information through intermediate UAVs is proposed. To track a moving target, a new estimation method using 1-step delayed information is developed which has low computational complexity. The communication topology with delayed information sharing is analyzed. In order to reduce communication traffic, a direct neighbors selection strategy is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed estimation strategy is demonstrated with simulation examples.