Towards cooperative localization in robotic swarms

Abstract

Cooperative localization allows groups of robots to improve their overall localization by sharing position estimates within the team. In spite of being a well studied problem, very few works deal with the increased complexity when a large number of robots is used, as is the case in robotic swarms. In this paper, we present a characterization and analysis of the cooperative localization problem for robotic swarms.We use a decentralized cooperativemechanism in which robots take turns as dynamic landmarks providing information to their teammates. We perform several simulations and analyze the influence of these dynamic landmarks in the localization. More specifically, we study the impact of the number of robots in the localization and how the choice of landmarks affects the results.