Cooperative Relative Localization: An Ego-Centric Approach

We are investigating cooperative methods for relative localization of mobile robot teams; this is, methods whereby every robot in the team can estimate the pose of every other robot, relative to itself. Crucially, our chosen method does not require the use GPS, landmarks, or maps of any kind; instead, robots make direct measurements of the relative pose of nearby robots, and broadcast this information to the team as a whole. Each robot processes this information independently to generate an ego-centric estimate for the pose of other robots.

The figure below illustrates the six basic rules used to update these independant ego-centric estimates (the actual estimates are maintained using a particle filter).

Movies showing the results from a four-robot localization experiment can be found here:

• Estimates generated by one of the robots
• Combined error plot

References

[howard_icra03a] Andrew Howard, Maja J Mataric´ and Gaurav S Sukhatme, "Putting the `I' in `Team': An Ego-Centric Approach to Cooperative Localization", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics an Automation (ICRA03), pages 868--892, Taipei, Taiwan, September 2003 (details)

Acknowledgements

This work is sponsored in part by DARPA grants DABT63-99-1-0015 and 5-39509-A (via UPenn) under the Mobile Autonomous Robot Software (MARS) program.