Cooperative source localisation of multi-agent system based on a cooperative PE condition

This study deals with cooperative source localisation with a group of agents where the source is static/dynamic. In stead of the traditionally defined persistent excitation (PE) condition, it is shown that a looser condition - cooperative PE condition - is sufficient for the source localisation provided the topology graph is connected. An estimator is designed to estimate the relative coordinate among agents; a local cooperative estimator based on cooperative PE condition is designed to estimate the relative location of the source; based on the first two steps, a consensus-based estimation fusion algorithm is given to guarantee that estimation errors asymptotically converge to 0. The cooperative localisation method is then extended to the case of a dynamic source and is analysed for the disturbance case. Finally, several simulation results are provided to show the correctness of the conclusion and the effectiveness of the proposed method.