Cooperative Filtering with Range Measurements: A Distributed Constrained Zonotopic Method

This article studies the distributed estimation problem of a multi-agent system with bounded absolute and relative range measurements. Parts of the agents are with high-accuracy absolute measurements, which are considered as anchors; the other agents utilize low-accuracy absolute and relative range measurements, each derives an uncertain range that contains its true state in a distributed manner. Different from previous studies, we design a distributed algorithm to handle the range measurements based on extended constrained zonotopes, which has low computational complexity and high precision. With our proposed algorithm, agents can derive their uncertain range sequentially along the chain topology, such that agents with low-accuracy sensors can benefit from the high-accuracy absolute measurements of anchors and improve the estimation performance. Simulation results indicate the effectiveness of our algorithm and verify our method can significantly improve the estimation accuracy.