Cooperative robot localization using event-triggered estimation

Michael Ouimet, David Iglesias, Nisar Ahmed, and Sonia Martínez
Journal of Aerospace and Information Systems, 15 (7) (2018) DOI: 10.2514/1.I010600

Abstract:

This paper describes a novel communication-spare cooperative localization algo- rithm for a team of mobile unmanned robotic vehicles. Exploiting an event-based estimation paradigm, robots only send measurements to neighbors when the expected innovation for state estimation is high. Since agents know the event-triggering condi- tion for measurements to be sent, the lack of a measurement is thus also informative and fused into state estimates. The robots use a Covariance Intersection (CI) mechanism to occasionally synchronize their local estimates of the full network state. In addi- tion, heuristic balancing dynamics on the robots' CI-triggering thresholds ensure that, in large diameter networks, the local error covariances remains below desired bounds across the network. Simulations on both linear and nonlinear dynamics/measurement models show that the event-triggering approach achieves nearly optimal state estima- tion performance in a wide range of operating conditions, even when using only a fraction of the communication cost required by conventional full data sharing. The robustness of the proposed approach to lossy communications, as well as the relationship between network topology and CI-based synchronization requirements, are also examined.

File: (ArXiv version)

Bib-tex entry:

@Article{MO-DI-NRA-SM:17-jais},
author = {M. Ouimet and D. Iglesias and N. Ahmed and S. Mart{\'\i}nez},
journal = {Journal of Aerospace and Information Systems},
title = {Cooperative robot localization using event-triggered estimation},
year = {2018},
volume = {15},
number ={7},
doi = {10.2514/1.I010600}
}