A cooperative localization algorithm for mobile sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a cooperative localization algorithm for mobile sensor networks with camera sensors to operate under GPS denied areas or indoor environments. Mobile robots are partitioned into two groups. One group moves within the field of views of remaining stationary robots. The moving robots are tracked by stationary robots and their trajectories are used as spatio-temporal features. From these spatio-temporal features, relative poses of robots are computed using multi-view geometry. In order to provide the poses of robots with respect to the reference coordinate system, robots take a turn and at least one robot is stationed as robots move across the field of interest. By taking the advantage of the multi-agent system, we can reliably localize robots over time as they perform a group task. In experiment, we demonstrate that the proposed method consistently achieves less than 1cm of localization error for trajectories of length less than 100cm and less than 0.34% of localization error for longer trajectories of length between 725cm and 769cm using an inexpensive off-the-shelf robotic platform.