Consensus-based cooperative source localization of multi-agent systems

This paper addresses cooperative source localization with a group of mobile agents, for which the goal is to estimate the coordinate of a stationary source for each agent in its own local frame. It is assumed that each agent can only have (possibly failure) range measurements about the source and some neighbors. Collaboration among agents is desired to overcome possible measurement failures and have unintermitted estimates in real time when some agents do not have direct range measurements about the source. The paper develops a continuous time estimation scheme and proposes a cooperative source localization approach for the problem. It is shown that the estimate of every agent is globally asymptotically convergent as long as there is a path from every agent to the source in the sensing graph. Simulation results are also presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.