Abstract
In this paper, we investigate the moving target tracking
problem in multi-robot systems. Each robot has a camera to
observe the target and a processor to implement the Kalman filter to estimate the target position, but has limited communication capability and can only communicate with neighbors.We propose to use a novel distributed Kalman filter to estimate the target position. We deduce the distributed Kalman filter based on the standard Kalman filter. The robot group needs to track the moving target, i.e. each robot needs to control its motors to move towards the detected target based on the estimated position. Meanwhile each of them needs to avoid collisions with neighbors. A flocking algorithm is developed to track the moving target. A group of wifibots is used to test the proposed algorithm. The experiment results show that the target tracking algorithm provides a satisfactory position estimation and the flocking group can smoothly track the target.
