Distributed Visual-Inertial Cooperative Localization
This work addresses localization challenges for multi-robot systems, offering a distributed solution that is efficient and scalable, though it builds incrementally on existing covariance intersection methods.
The paper tackles multi-robot cooperative localization by developing a distributed state estimator that fuses visual-inertial data and loop-closure constraints, achieving accuracy comparable to a centralized approach without significant computational overhead.
In this paper we present a consistent and distributed state estimator for multi-robot cooperative localization (CL) which efficiently fuses environmental features and loop-closure constraints across time and robots. In particular, we leverage covariance intersection (CI) to allow each robot to only estimate its own state and autocovariance and compensate for the unknown correlations between robots. Two novel multi-robot methods for utilizing common environmental SLAM features are introduced and evaluated in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Moreover, we adapt CI to enable drift-free estimation through the use of loop-closure measurement constraints to other robots' historical poses without a significant increase in computational cost. The proposed distributed CL estimator is validated against its non-realtime centralized counterpart extensively in both simulations and real-world experiments.