Integrated cooperative localization of heterogeneous measurement swarm: A unified data-driven method
This addresses the problem of enabling robust localization for heterogeneous robotic swarms with limited sensor capabilities, representing a domain-specific incremental advance.
The paper tackled cooperative localization in heterogeneous robotic systems with sparse measurement topologies by developing a data-driven adaptive estimator for pairwise relative localization and a distributed pose-coupling strategy, achieving localization under weakly connected directed topologies, which is the least restrictive condition among existing methods.
The cooperative localization (CL) problem in heterogeneous robotic systems with different measurement capabilities is investigated in this work. In practice, heterogeneous sensors lead to directed and sparse measurement topologies, whereas most existing CL approaches rely on multilateral localization with restrictive multi-neighbor geometric requirements. To overcome this limitation, we enable pairwise relative localization (RL) between neighboring robots using only mutual measurement and odometry information. A unified data-driven adaptive RL estimator is first developed to handle heterogeneous and unidirectional measurements. Based on the convergent RL estimates, a distributed pose-coupling CL strategy is then designed, which guarantees CL under a weakly connected directed measurement topology, representing the least restrictive condition among existing results. The proposed method is independent of specific control tasks and is validated through a formation control application and real-world experiments.