Multi-sensor consensus estimation of state, sensor biases and unknown input

This paper addresses the problem of the joint estimation of system state and generalized sensor bias (GSB) under a common unknown input (UI) in the case of bias evolution in a heterogeneous sensor network. First, the equivalent UI-free GSB dynamic model is derived and the local optimal estimates of system state and sensor bias are obtained in each sensor node; Second, based on the state and bias estimates obtained by each node from its neighbors, the UI is estimated via the least-squares method, and then the state estimates are fused via consensus processing; Finally, the multi-sensor bias estimates are further refined based on the consensus estimate of the UI. A numerical example of distributed multi-sensor target tracking is presented to illustrate the proposed filter.