Lab meeting Oct 3rd 2012 (Gene): Decentralised Cooperative Localisation for Heterogeneous Teams of Mobile Robots

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Presented by Chun-Kai (Gene) Chang

From ICRA2011 Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

Authors: Tim Bailey, Mitch Bryson, Hua Mu , John Vial, Lachlan McCalman and Hugh Durrant-Whyte


Abstract:
This paper presents a distributed algorithm for
performing joint localisation of a team of robots. The mobile
robots have heterogeneous sensing capabilities, with some having
high quality inertial and exteroceptive sensing, while others have
only low quality sensing or none at all. By sharing information,
a combined estimate of all robot poses is obtained. Interrobot
range-bearing measurements provide the mechanism for
transferring pose information from well-localised vehicles to those
less capable.
In our proposed formulation, high frequency egocentric data
(e.g., odometry, IMU, GPS) is fused locally on each platform. This
is the distributed part of the algorithm. Inter-robot measurements,
and accompanying state estimates, are communicated to a central
server, which generates an optimal minimum mean-squared
estimate of all robot poses. This server is easily duplicated for
full redundant decentralisation. Communication and computation
are efficient due to the sparseness properties of the informationform
Gaussian representation. A team of three indoor mobile
robots equipped with lasers, odometry and inertial sensing provides
experimental verification of the algorithms effectiveness in
combining location information.