MULTIDETECTION IN MULTIROBOT COOPERATIVE LOCALIZATION

This paper describes a new technique to cooperative multirobot localization based on multidetection. In conventional multirobot localization, the poses beliefs of two robots are updated whenever one robot detects another one and measures their relative distance. When a group of robots localize themselves in the same environment, it may happen that one robot detects more than one robot at once or that one robot sees other robot that sees another one - both cases depict a multidetection situation. We propose a communication structure to incorporate the multidetection information in the pose belief. The key idea is that robots more certain about their poses have more useful information to share with other robots, so they should communicate first, propagating their knowledge to the rest of the group. The technique has been implemented and tested in simulated environments. Experiments show significant improvements in localization accuracy when compared with the conventional multirobot localization.