Consensus-based distributed estimation for target tracking in heterogeneous sensor networks

In this paper the problem of distributed target tracking is considered. A network of heterogeneous sensing agents is used to observe a maneuvering target and, at each iteration, all the agents are able to agree about the estimate of the target position, despite the fact that only a small percentage of agents can sense the target at each time instant. Our Consensus-based Distributed Target Tracking (CDTT) is a fully distributed iterative tracking algorithm, in which each iteration is based on two phases: an estimation phase and a consensus one. As a result, the estimated trajectories are identical for all the agents at each time instant. Numerical simulations and comparison with another target tracking algorithm are carried out to show the effectiveness and feasibility of our approach. © 2011 IEEE.