Vision-based Multi-MAV Localization with Anonymous Relative Measurements Using Coupled Probabilistic Data Association Filter
This work addresses localization for multi-MAV systems in GPS-denied environments, which is an incremental improvement for robotics applications.
The paper tackles the problem of localizing multiple micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) without external infrastructure by fusing onboard visual-inertial odometry with anonymous visual detections of other robots, addressing challenges like unknown initial configurations and data association. It demonstrates superior performance over a simple VIO-based method in simulations using real data models.
We address the localization of robots in a multi-MAV system where external infrastructure like GPS or motion capture systems may not be available. Our approach lends itself to implementation on platforms with several constraints on size, weight, and power (SWaP). Particularly, our framework fuses the onboard VIO with the anonymous, visual-based robot-to-robot detection to estimate all robot poses in one common frame, addressing three main challenges: 1) the initial configuration of the robot team is unknown, 2) the data association between each vision-based detection and robot targets is unknown, and 3) the vision-based detection yields false negatives, false positives, inaccurate, and provides noisy bearing, distance measurements of other robots. Our approach extends the Coupled Probabilistic Data Association Filter (CPDAF)[1] to cope with nonlinear measurements. We demonstrate the superior performance of our approach over a simple VIO-based method in a simulation with the measurement models statistically modeled using the real experimental data. We also show how onboard sensing, estimation, and control can be used for formation flight.