Cooperative localization and tracking in distributed robot-sensor networks

This paper addresses the problem of real-time position and orientation estimation of networked mobile robots in two-dimensional Euclidean space with simultaneous tracking of a rigid unknown object based on exteroceptive sensory information extracted from distributed vision systems. The sufficient and necessary conditions for team localization are proposed. A localization and object tracking approach based on statistical operators and graph searching algorithms is presented for a team of robots localized with heterogeneous sensors. The approach was implemented in an experimental platform consisting of car-like mobile robots equipped with omnidirectional video cameras and IEEE 802.11b wireless networking. The experimental results validate the approach.