Laser based simultaneous mutual localisation for multiple mobile robots

The premise of cooperative localisation is extended by the idea of simultaneous mutual localisation in this paper. Through simultaneous mutual observation robot teams are able to determine their relative poses accurately and robustly. This novel localisation scheme coupled with a custom circular target fitting approach delivers good pose determination with average position and orientation errors of 0.01 m and 1.4/spl deg/. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme can be used to produce maps with a geometric error of about 2%.