On Distributed State Estimation with Bearing Measurements

State estimation with multiple sensors is an important topic in guidance and target tracking problems. This paper is concerned with the distributed state estimation over bearings-only sensors where each sensor’s measurements are the bearings from the sensor to a moving target. Firstly, the distance from local sensors to the target is estimated by combining bearing measurements of neighboring sensors. The virtual position measurement is given using the distance estimation. Then, the distributed Kalman filter based on the distance estimation is constructed to estimate the moving target’s states. Finally, numerical simulations results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.