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Main Authors: De Carli, Nicola, Bastianello, Nicola, Dimarogonas, Dimos V.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21608
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author De Carli, Nicola
Bastianello, Nicola
Dimarogonas, Dimos V.
author_facet De Carli, Nicola
Bastianello, Nicola
Dimarogonas, Dimos V.
contents This paper addresses distributed state estimation for multi-agent systems with local and relative measurements, motivated by cooperative localization problems in which the global state dimension scales with the size of the network. We consider a Kalman-like observer in information form and introduce a sparsity-preserving prediction step based on an exponential forgetting factor, thereby avoiding the dense Riccati recursion of the standard information filter. The correction step is recast as a strongly convex quadratic program with structure induced by the sensing graph, which enables a distributed solution based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). In the resulting scheme, each agent updates local copies of its own correction variable and those of its neighbors using only local communication, thus avoiding centralized matrix inversion and consensus over full global-state quantities. A two-time-scale stability analysis is developed for the interconnected observer: the reduced estimation-error dynamics are shown to be uniformly exponentially stable, the ADMM dynamics define an exponentially stable fast subsystem, and these properties are combined to establish uniform exponential stability of the overall distributed observer. Numerical simulations in a multi-agent cooperative localization scenario illustrate the performance of the proposed distributed observer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_21608
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ADMM-Based Distributed Kalman-like Observer with Applications to Cooperative Localization
De Carli, Nicola
Bastianello, Nicola
Dimarogonas, Dimos V.
Systems and Control
This paper addresses distributed state estimation for multi-agent systems with local and relative measurements, motivated by cooperative localization problems in which the global state dimension scales with the size of the network. We consider a Kalman-like observer in information form and introduce a sparsity-preserving prediction step based on an exponential forgetting factor, thereby avoiding the dense Riccati recursion of the standard information filter. The correction step is recast as a strongly convex quadratic program with structure induced by the sensing graph, which enables a distributed solution based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). In the resulting scheme, each agent updates local copies of its own correction variable and those of its neighbors using only local communication, thus avoiding centralized matrix inversion and consensus over full global-state quantities. A two-time-scale stability analysis is developed for the interconnected observer: the reduced estimation-error dynamics are shown to be uniformly exponentially stable, the ADMM dynamics define an exponentially stable fast subsystem, and these properties are combined to establish uniform exponential stability of the overall distributed observer. Numerical simulations in a multi-agent cooperative localization scenario illustrate the performance of the proposed distributed observer.
title ADMM-Based Distributed Kalman-like Observer with Applications to Cooperative Localization
topic Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21608