Distributed Invariant Kalman Filter for Object-Level Multi-Robot Pose SLAM

Cooperative localization and target tracking are essential for multi-robot systems to implement high-level tasks. To this end, we propose a distributed invariant Kalman filter (KF) based on covariance intersection (CI) for effective multi-robot pose estimation. The paper utilizes the object-level measurement models, which have condensed information further reducing the communication burden. Besides, by modeling states on special Lie groups, and representing uncertainty in corresponding Lie algebras, better linearity and consistency are obtained under the invariant KF framework. We also combine CI and invariant KF to avoid overly confident or conservative estimates in multi-robot systems with intricate and unknown correlations, and some level of robot degradation is acceptable through multi-robot collaboration. The simulation and real data experiment validate the practicability and superiority of the proposed algorithm. The source code is publicly available ¹¹https://github.com/LIAS-CUHKSZ/Distributed-object-based-SLAM.