Range-only Collaborative Localization for Ground Vehicles
This addresses localization for ground vehicle teams, but it is incremental as it builds on existing collaborative localization methods by focusing on range-only measurements and static vehicle requirements.
The paper tackles the problem of achieving high-accuracy absolute localization for ground vehicles using range-only collaborative localization, requiring two static vehicles to ensure bounded errors, and demonstrates through simulations and experiments with 3 and 5 vehicles that the system enables accurate, real-time pose estimation.
High-accuracy absolute localization for a team of vehicles is essential when accomplishing various kinds of tasks. As a promising approach, collaborative localization fuses the individual motion measurements and the inter-vehicle measurements to collaboratively estimate the states. In this paper, we focus on the range-only collaborative localization, which specifies the inter-vehicle measurements as inter-vehicle ranging measurements. We first investigate the observability properties of the system and derive that to achieve bounded localization errors, two vehicles are required to remain static like external infrastructures. Under the guide of the observability analysis, we then propose our range-only collaborative localization system which categorize the ground vehicles into two static vehicles and dynamic vehicles. The vehicles are connected utilizing a UWB network that is capable of both producing inter-vehicle ranging measurements and communication. Simulation results validate the observability analysis and demonstrate that collaborative localization is capable of achieving higher accuracy when utilizing the inter-vehicle measurements. Extensive experimental results are performed for a team of 3 and 5 vehicles. The real-world results illustrate that our proposed system enables accurate and real-time estimation of all vehicles' absolute poses.