Monte Carlo multi-robot localization based on grid cells and characteristic particles

In this paper, a Monte Carlo method based approach for multi-robot localization is described. In this approach, grid cells are used to describe the whole particle set which is used in MCL method to estimate the pose of robot. Then, the sizes of the grid cells are adjusted to capture the characteristic particles that can represent the property of all particles. The characteristic particles can be used to estimate the robot's position in its operation space. Because the number of the characteristic particles is much less than that of the total particles, this approach can reduce the computing time greatly. Simulation results are also given to show that this approach can obtain good localization performance in multi-robot system