A visibility information for multi-robot localization

Abstract

This paper proposes a set-membership method based on interval analysis to solve the pose tracking problem for a team of robots. The originality of this approach is to consider only weak sensor data: the visibility between two robots. The paper demonstrates that with this poor information, without using bearing or range sensors, a localization is possible. By using this boolean information (two robots see each other or not), the objective is to compensate the odometry errors and be able to localize in an indoor environment all the robots of the team, in a guaranteed way. The environment is supposed to be defined by two sets, an inner and an outer characterizations. This paper mainly presents the visibility theory used to develop the method. Simulated results allow to evaluate the efficiency and the limits of the proposed algorithm.