A derivative-free distributed filtering approach for sensorless control of nonlinear systems

This article examines the problem of sensorless control for nonlinear dynamical systems with the use of derivative-free Extended Information Filtering (EIF). The system is first subject to a linearisation transformation and next state estimation is performed by applying the standard Kalman Filter to the linearised model. At a second level, the standard Information Filter is used to fuse the state estimates obtained from local derivative-free Kalman filters running at the local information processing nodes. This approach has significant advantages because unlike the EIF (i) is not based on local linearisation of the nonlinear dynamics (ii) does not assume truncation of higher order Taylor expansion terms thus preserving the accuracy and robustness of the performed estimation and (iii) does not require the computation of Jacobian matrices. As a case study a robotic manipulator is considered and a cameras network consisting of multiple vision nodes is assumed to provide the visual information to be used in the control loop. A derivative-free implementation of the EIF is used to produce the aggregate state vector of the robot by processing local state estimates coming from the distributed vision nodes. The performance of the considered sensorless control scheme is evaluated through simulation experiments.