Distributed estimation of internal wave parameters via inter-drogue distances

This paper considers a group of drogues estimating the physical parameters of the ocean´s linear internal waves. While underwater, individual drogues do not have access to position information and instead rely on inter-drogue distance measurements. We introduce the PARAMETER ESTIMATION BY ZERO-DERIVATIVE METHOD for determining the parameters of a horizontally propagating internal ocean wave and show that, for noiseless measurements, our strategy determines the parameters exactly. In the presence of additive Gaussian noise, we characterize precisely the robustness of our strategy and bound the error in the estimated parameters. Finally, we define two strategies for aggregating estimates obtained across multiple time instants. Several simulations illustrate our results.