A Distributed Particle Filter for Bearings-Only Tracking on Spherical Surfaces

We present a distributed particle filter for bearings-only tracking of a target moving on the surface of a sphere, such as Earth. The proposed filter accounts for the curvature of the surface in the measurement model for more robust performance. In addition, a linearization of the likelihood function significantly reduces the communication overhead. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed distributed approach maintains accuracy comparable to that of a centralized filter with access to all measurements even when the sensors and target are spread over a large region, where a planar approximation would fail.