Information weighted consensus-based cooperative space object tracking to overcome malfunctioned sensors and noisy links

Bin Jia, Khanh D. Pham, Erik Blasch, Dan Shen, Zhonghai Wang, Xin Tian, Genshe Chen

Abstract: With the rapid development of sensor technology, multiple sensors are often available in many engineering applications, such as space object tracking. How to effectively use multiple sensor information is the key to achieving accurate space object state information. In this paper, the information weighted consensus (IWC) strategy is deployed to solve the cooperative sensor tracking problem. In addition, the information theoretic method and the repeated consensus, are used to detect a malfunctioned sensor and overcome the problem of noisy links in the cooperative tracking scenario. The proposed algorithms are demonstrated by a typical space object tracking problem using multiple sensors. The results indicate that: 1) The proposed algorithms can obtain stable estimation results when there is malfunctioned node in the network, 2) can mitigate the effect of noisy links, and 3) achieves close performance to the result with perfect communication links and known malfunctioned node. The results will facilitate the application of using the information weighted consensus algorithm for real multiple sensor space object tracking scenarios.