Multisensor fusion for linear control systems with asynchronous, Out-Of-Sequence and erroneous data

This paper presents a set of new centralized algorithms for estimating the state of linear dynamic Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) control systems with asynchronous, non-systematically delayed and corrupted measurements provided by a set of sensors. The delays, which make the data available Out-Of-Sequence (OOS), appear when using physically distributed sensors, communication networks and pre-processing algorithms. The potentially corrupted measurements can be generated by malfunctioning sensors or communication errors. Our algorithms, designed to work with real-time control systems, handle these problems with a streamlined memory and computational efficient reorganization of the basic operations of the Kalman and Information Filters (KF & IF). The two versions designed to deal only with valid measurements are optimal solutions of the OOS problem, while the other two remaining are suboptimal algorithms able to handle corrupted data.