Consensus-based multi-UAV target tracking with communication delays

In the process of distributed multi-UAV target tracking, the communication delays among the UAVs will increase the estimation error of the consensus filter algorithm. In order to alleviate the effect of this problem on estimation algorithm, an estimation algorithm with information compensation for communication delays is proposed. Firstly, the information of communication delays from the other UAVs are predicted by using the filter on each UAV, and the compensated information is obtained. Besides, the estimation algorithm of information compensation for communication delay is obtained by using the consensus algorithm combined with the unscented Kalman filter. Finally, the effect of the proposed algorithm is tested and analyzed through simulation. The result shows that, with the proposed method, the target location estimation errors and the consensus errors among different UAVs are reduced to the level which can be compared to that without communication delays. Taking the communication delaying two sampling periods as an example, the target location estimation errors and the consensus errors are reduced about 85% and 48% respectively.