Robust and scalable distributed recursive least squares

Abstract

We consider a problem of robust estimation over a network in an errors-in-variables context. Each agent measures noisy samples of a local pair of signals related by a linear regression defined by a common unknown parameter, and the agents must cooperate to find the unknown parameter in presence of uncertainty affecting both the regressor and the regressand variables. We propose a recursive least squares estimation method providing global exponential convergence to the unknown parameter in absence of uncertainty, and robust stability of the estimate, formalized in terms of input-to-state stability, in presence of uncertainty affecting all the variables. The result relies on a cooperative excitation assumption that is proved to be strictly weaker than persistency of excitation of each local data set. The proposed estimator is validated on an adaptive road pricing application.