A Server-Assisted Loosely Coupled Cooperative Localization Under Limited Connectivity

This letter studies the global localization of a group of communicating mobile agents via a dead-reckoning system aided by occasional interagent relative measurements. We consider a setting that communication network is unreliable and maintaining network-wide connectivity is not possible at all times. We propose a hybrid approach that improves the localization performance of a loosely coupled cooperative localization algorithm by fusing its estimates with those obtained opportunistically from a server-assisted tightly coupled cooperative localization. The resulting hybrid algorithm inherits the advantages of both of its constituting algorithms. A numerical example demonstrates our results.