Distributed fusion filter for multi-rate multi-sensor systems with packet dropouts

This paper is concerned with the distributed fusion filtering problem for a class of asynchronous multi-rate multi-sensor systems with different packet dropout rates, where the system is described at the highest sampling rate and different sensors may have different measurement sampling rates. Firstly, the multi-rate fusion estimation problem is transformed into an equivalent single rate fusion estimation problem using a “dummy” measurement. Then, the optimal distributed fusion filter is given based on the well-known optimal fusion algorithm weighted by matrices in the linear minimum variance sense. The filtering error cross-covariance matrix is derived between any two subsystems. Simulation research verifies the effectiveness of the proposed filter.