Tracking a Decentralized Linear Trajectory in an Intermittent Observation Environment

Faults and failures are familiar case studies in centralized and decentralized tracking systems. The processing of sensor data becomes more severe in the presence of faults/failures and/or noise. Effective schemes have been presented for decentralized systems, in the presence of faults only. In some practical scenarios of systems, there are certain interruptions in addition to these faults. These interruptions may occur in the form of noise. However it is expected that the decision about the sensor data is difficult in the presence of noise. This is because the noise adversely affects the communication amongst sensors and the processing unit. More complexity is expected when there are faults and noise simultaneously. To deal with this problem, in addition to existing fault detection and isolation schemes, the Kalman filter is employed. Here, a generic discussion is provided, which is equally applicable to other situations. This work addresses various faults in the presence of noise for decentralized tracking systems. Local single faults and multiple faults in the presence of noise are the core issues addressed in this paper. The proposed work is comprised of a general scenario for a decentralized tracking system followed by a case study of a target tracking scenario with and without noise. The presented schemes are also tested for different types of faults. The proposed work presents effective tracking in the presence of noise and faults. The results obtained demonstrate the acceptable performance of the scheme of this work.