Cooperative Localization in Mobile Robots Using Event-Triggered Mechanism: Theory and Experiments

This article addresses a new cooperative localization problem for a team of mobile robots subject to limited communication resources. First, we develop a decentralized event-triggered cooperative localization (DECL) algorithm for multirobot system such that each robot localizes itself with minimum communication exchange between robots. Then, using an event-triggered mechanism we propose an optimization framework to achieve a balance between estimation performance and communication rate. Simulation results show the main benefits of the event-triggered mechanism. Also, experimental results using four e-puck2 mobile robots demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Note to Practitioners—Multiple mobile robots are able to implement certain tasks that are beyond the capabilities of individual robots. In multirobot system, the accurate localization of each robot in the team is essential for a successful operation. Existing cooperative localization approaches neglect some realistic limitations of mobile robots, such as battery capacity and communication bandwidth. Especially, this issue is important when the number of sensors, actuators, and robots in the team increases. This article was motivated by these realistic limitations of mobile robots and it suggests a new approach for cooperative localization based on event-triggered mechanism. Motived by the aforementioned discussion, our objective is to design and implement the event-triggered cooperative localization for a group of e-puck2 robots. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results show that we achieve a tradeoff between localization accuracy and communication resources.