Distributed Full-State Observers With Limited Communication and Application to Cooperative Target Localization

Abstract

We present a fully decentralized motion control algorithm for the coordination of platoons of mobile agents with highly restricted communication capabilities. In order to address very low bandwidth communication between agents and time varying communication network topologies, we utilize a distributed full-state observer onboard each agent. Agent motion and data fusion algorithms are implemented locally by each agent based on the state of the local full-state estimator. Although no separation principle exists between decentralized agent motion control and distributed data fusion in general, we introduce a gradient-based framework in which simultaneously we achieve asymptotic agreement among full-state estimators and convergence of desired agent motion.