Decentralized Cooperative Multi-Robot Localization with EKF

Abstract: Multi-robot localization has been a critical problem for robots performing complex tasks cooperatively. In this paper, we propose a decentralized approach to localize a group of robots in a large featureless environment. The proposed approach only requires that at least one robot remains stationary as a temporary landmark during a certain period of time. The novelty of our approach is threefold: (1) developing a decentralized scheme that each robot calculates their own state and only stores the latest one to reduce storage and computational cost, (2) developing an efficient localization algorithm through the extended Kalman filter (EKF) that only uses observations of relative pose to estimate the robot positions, (3) developing a scheme has less requirements on landmarks and more robustness against insufficient observations. Various simulations and experiments using five robots equipped with relative pose-measurement sensors are performed to validate the superior performance of our approach.