Leader-follower bearing-based distributed pose estimation for multi-vehicle networks

In this paper, we consider the problem of distributed pose estimation of multi-vehicle networks, with a leader-follower structure evolving on SO(3) x R-3, relying on individual linear and angular velocity measurements as well as local inter-vehicle time-varying bearing measurements. We propose a cascaded nonlinear distributed pose estimation scheme where the estimated attitude obtained from an exponentially stable observer is fed to an input-to-state stable position estimation scheme, leading to an overall pose estimation scheme enjoying an exponential stability property. Numerical simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed estimation scheme.