A Dynamic Generalized Kalman Consensus Filter for Switching Sensor Networks

Abstract: Distributed state estimation is critical for applications such as surveillance, autonomous navigation, and wide-area monitoring, where sensor agents must cooperatively track targets using only local measurements and neighbor-to-neighbor communication. Existing distributed filters have been shown to achieve accurate estimation even under sparse inter-agent communication and limited sensing ranges. However, many of these methods rely on consensus parameters that depend on global properties of the communication graph, such as the maximum degree of the graph, and are therefore sensitive to changes in network topology. This limitation is particularly significant in sensor networks with mobile agents, where communication links change over time. This paper presents a Dynamic Generalized Kalman Consensus Filter for target tracking in sensor networks with switching communication topologies. The proposed algorithm computes information-based consensus weights using only locally available quantities, eliminating the need for global network parameters. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm maintains estimation accuracy under switching network topologies and outperforms existing distributed filters in the given tracking problem.