COOPERATIVE MULTI-ROBOT LOCALIZATION: USING COMMUNICATION TO REDUCE LOCALIZATION ERROR

Abstract

autonomous systems, mobile robots, multi-robot localization, cooperative multi-robot. In this paper is presented a statistical algorithm for cooperative multi-robot localization. The problem of multirobot localization consists of localizing each robot in a group within the same environment, when robots share information in order to improve localization accuracy. Our approach is based on a well-known probabilistic localization approach, the Markov localization, that was initially designed to a single robot. In order to accommodate multi-robot cooperation in Markov localization it is used a detection model. In this model two robots exchange their beliefs of poses whenever one robot detects another. We propose a novel detection model in that all robots in the group can benefit from a meeting of two robots through detection propagation. The technique has been implemented and tested in simulated environments. Experiments illustrate improvements in localization accuracy when compared with a previous multi-robot localization approach. 1