RF-based Relative Position Estimation in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks with Confidence Regions

Relative localisation of mobile robots can provide useful information to applications, from formation control, to joint exploration and inspection. One way to obtain relative localisation is to measure distances between the multiple robots. In this scope, distance estimates based on RF ranging data can be beneficial for small/inexpensive communicating robots that have no other means of measuring distances, or as disambiguation of multiple hypothesis in high accuracy localisation systems. In this work, we present a technique of estimating the relative positions of simple mobile robots in a small team using the distance information that can be captured by a wireless transceiver, only. Simulation results with a team of five mobile robots show that we can estimate their relative positions with an average accuracy of 1.3 meters without any fixed reference and using RF information, only. The main contribution of our work is that we can provide consistent reliability information as the covariance of the obtained positions.