Range-Only Based Cooperative Localization for Mobile Robots

In this paper, we address the problem of localizing mobile robots based on range-only measurements from low cost Ultra-Wide-Band (UWB) sensors. The proposed solution considers every static or mobile object as beacons with contextual information. A beacon-to-beacon measurement is performed using UWB sensors and the position estimation is computed by the target beacon. This strategy allows to hide the cooperative localization problem behind these measurements. The fusion algorithm is based on a Split Intersection Covariance Filter which allows to correctly handle the correlation between the poses estimations of the beacons. We present the consistency of this solution using a simulation with 3 robots and 4 static beacons and a real experimentation with 1 robot and 3 static beacons.