This paper presents the development and demonstration of non-Gaussian, decentralised state estimation using an outdoor sensor network consisting of an autonomous air vehicle, a manual ground vehicle, and two human operators. The location and appearance of landmarks were estimated using bearing only observations from monocular cameras. We show that inclusion of visual and identity information aids validation gating for data association when geometric information alone cannot discriminate individual landmarks. The combination of geometric, appearance, and identity information provided a common description (or map) of natural features for each of the nodes in the network. We also show the final map from the live demonstration which includes position estimates and classification labels of the observed features.
Decentralised estimation of heterogeneous sensors is performed on an outdoor network. Attributes such as position, appearance, and identity represented by non-Gaussian distributions are used in in the fusion process. It is shown here that real-time decentralised data fusion of non-Gaussian estimates can be used to build rich environmental maps. Human operators are also used as additional sensors in the network to complement robotic information.