Distributed Cooperative Kalman Filter Constrained by Discretized Poisson Equation for Mobile Sensor Networks

This paper proposes cooperative Kalman filters for distributed mobile sensor networks where the mobile sensors are organized into cells that resemble a mesh grid to cover a spatial area. The mobile sensor networks are deployed to map an underlying spatial-temporal field modeled by the Poisson equation. After discretizing the Poisson equation with finite volume method, we found that the cooperative Kalman filters for the cells are subjected to a set of distributed constraints. The field value and gradient information at each cell center can be estimated by the constrained cooperative Kalman filter using measurements within each cell and information from neighboring cells. We also provide convergence analysis for the distributed constrained cooperative Kalman filter. Simulation results with a five cell network validates the proposed distributed filtering method.