Single landmark based collaborative multi-agent localization with time-varying range measurements and information sharing

This paper considers the collaborative localization problem for a team of mobile agents. The goal is to estimate the relative coordinate of each agent with respect to a stationary landmark. Each agent is supposed to be able to measure its own velocity and the distances to nearby agents as well as the change rates of the distances. Due to limited sensing capability, movements of agents and possible interference of severe environments, the topology describing the measurements and communication information flow among the agents and the landmark is usually time-varying. Under such a scenario, this paper develops a consensus-like fusion scheme together with a continuous-time estimator for the collaborative localization problem. It is proved that the fused estimate of each agent’s position globally asymptotically converges to its true value if the movements of the agents satisfy a persistent excitation condition and each agent is uniformly jointly reachable from the landmark in the time-varying topology. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified through simulations without and with measurement noises.