A joint filter for formation tracking

There is a growing interest in unmanned formation missions. For these kinds of missions, there is a need to track each member in the formation. The classical way of addressing such a problem, is to address each member in the formation separately and design its own filter, independently from the other member filters. An implementation of a joint filter for the formation members is proposed. Such a filter utilizes the fact that the velocity of formation members is almost the same, in its core structure. Closed-form analytical solution to the error state covariance of the joint filter and the corresponding gain matrix are derived and compared to the individual filter for each formation member implementation.