Distributed cooperative localization for sparse communication network with multi-locating messages

In cooperative localization with sparse communication networks, an agent maybe only receives part of locating messages from the others. It is difficult for the receiver to utilize the part instead of global knowledge. Under the extended Kalman filtering, the utilization of the locating message is maximized by two aspects: the locating message generating and multi-locating messages fusing. For the former, the covariance upper-bound technique, by introducing amplification coefficients, is employed to remove the dependency of locating messages on the global knowledge. For the latter, an optimization model is setup; the covariance matrix determinant of the receiver's state estimate, expressed as a function of the amplification coefficients, is selected as the optimization criterion, under linear constraints on the amplification coefficient characteristics and the communication connectivity. Using the optimization solution, the local optimal state of the receiver agent is obtained by the weighting fusion. Simulation with seven agents is shown to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.