Server assisted distributed cooperative localization over unreliable communication links

Abstract: This paper considers the problem of cooperative localization (CL) using inter-robot measurements for a group of networked robots with limited on-board resources. We propose a novel recursive algorithm in which each robot localizes itself in a global coordinate frame by local dead reckoning, and opportunistically corrects its pose estimate whenever it receives a relative measurement update message from a server. The computation and storage cost per robot in terms of the size of the team is of order O(1), and the robots are only required to transmit information when they are involved in a relative measurement. The server also only needs to compute and transmit update messages when it receives an inter-robot measurement. We show that under perfect communication, our algorithm is an alternative but exact implementation of a joint CL for the entire team via Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The perfect communication however is not a hard requirement. In fact, we show that our algorithm is intrinsically robust with respect to communication failures, with formal guarantees that the updated estimates of the robots receiving the update message are of minimum variance in a first-order approximate sense at that given timestep. We demonstrate the performance of the algorithm in simulation and experiments.