Complementary Localization for Multi Robots

Abstract

This paper proposes a multi-robot cooperative localization method based on the reliability evaluation of positioning and complementary information sharing, with the aim of contributing to the practical application of multi-robot systems. In conventional methods, robots are often separated into two groups, parents that serve as a reference for positioning and children that depend on its information, but errors in the parent robot can spread to the entire robot system. Therefore, we propose a method to estimate robots' positions by dynamically switching reference robots without specifying a particular robot as a parent. We evaluate the reliability of positioning based on the number of positioning references observed by each robot and the uncertainty of each robot's position estimation. After that, robots complementarily share information and switch the reference robot based on these references. The effectiveness of the method was verified using data obtained from actual robots. The results show that the proposed method can provide stable position estimation for the entire robot swarm better than the case where the parent robots are predetermined, even if there were robots with position estimation errors.