Analysis of the Unscented Transform for Cooperative Localization with only Inter-vehicle Ranging Information

Abstract

Cooperative localization in multi-agent robotic systems is challenging, especially when agents rely on limited information, such as only peer-to-peer range measurements. Two key challenges arise: utilizing this limited information to improve position estimation; handling uncertainties from sensor noise, nonlinearity, and unknown correlations between agents’ measurements; and avoiding information reuse. This paper examines the use of the Unscented Transform (UT) for state estimation for a case in which range measurement between agents and covariance intersection (CI) is used to handle unknown correlations. Unlike Kalman Filter approaches, CI methods fuse complete state and covariance estimates. This makes formulating a CI approach with ranging-only measurements a challenge. To overcome this, UT is used to handle uncertainties and formulate a cooperative state update using range measurements and current cooperative state estimates. This introduces information reuse in the measurement update. Therefore, this work aims to evaluate the limitations and utility of this formulation when faced with various levels of state measurement uncertainty and errors.