A state exchange approach in real conditions for multi-robot cooperative localization

In this paper, a state exchange based multi-robot localization is proposed in particular experiments in real conditions. The goal of such an approach is to combine the data coming from several mobile communicating robots in order to i) update and maintain in each robot an optimal map of the whole fleet, and ii) improve all the poses estimation taking into account that vehicles can detect and localize their neighbors. The approach is based on a state exchange procedure and is real applications dedicated. So, the problems of data incest, communication latencies or losses has been solved and the robot detection association has been addressed. This paper presents the overall principle of the approach and shows several results obtained in real-time situations with real Cycabs vehicles.