Aas 11-117 Distributed Orbit Determination via Estimation Consensus

This paper proposes an optimal algorithm for distributed orbit determination by using discrete observations provided from multiple tracking stations in a connected network. The objective is to increase the precision of estimation by communication and cooperation between tracking stations in the network. We focus on the dynamical approach considering a simplified Low Earth Orbital Satellite model with random perturbations introduced in the observation data which is provided as ranges between tracking stations and satellite. The dual decomposition theory associated with the subgradient method is applied here to decompose the estimation task into a series of suboptimal problems and then solve them individually at each tracking station to achieve the global optimality.