Bearing-only Cooperative Localization - Simulation and Experimental Results

In cooperative localization a group of robots exchange relative position measurements from their exteroceptive sensors and their motion information from interoceptive sensors to collectively estimate their position and heading. For the localization errors to be bounded, it is required that the system be observable, independent of the estimation technique being used. In this paper, we develop a test-bed of three ground robots, which are equipped with wheel encoders and omnidirectional cameras, to implement the bearing-only cooperative localization. The simulation and experimental results validate the observability conditions, derived in [1], for the complete observability of the bearing-only cooperative localization problem.