Distributed ATC Particle Filters for Cooperative Quaternion Tracking

We propose in this paper two adapt-then-combine (ATC) distributed particle filters for cooperative estimation of 3D orientations. The first algorithm represents rotations as elements of the Special Orthogonal Group and builds Gaussian parametric approximations on a Lie Algebra to fuse posterior probability densities. The second algorithm, in turn, represents the orientations as unit-norm quaternions and resorts to directional statistics, fusing von Mises-Fisher parametric approximations. The proposed algorithms performances are then evaluated via numerical simulations.