Distributed adaptive Kalman filter based on variational Bayesian technique

In this paper, distributed Kalman filter design is studied for linear dynamics with unknown measurement noise variance, which modeled by Wishart distribution. To solve the problem in a multi-agent network, a distributed adaptive Kalman filter is proposed with the help of variational Bayesian, where the posterior distribution of joint state and noise variance is approximated by a free-form distribution. The con vergence of the proposed algorithm is proved in two main steps: n oise statistics is estimated, where each age nt only use its local information in variational Bayesian expectation (VB-E) step, and state is estimated by a consensus algorithm in variational Bayesian maximum (VB-M) step. Finally, a distributed target tracking problem is investigated with simulations for illustration.