Analysis of positioning uncertainty in reconfigurable networks of heterogeneous mobile robots

This work studies the localization accuracy of a team of mobile robots that perform cooperative localization. We provide an analytical expression for the upper bound in positioning accuracy as a function of a weighted connectivity graph for the network of relative position measurements in the robot group. This network has a time-varying topology determined by the availability of relative position measurements between pairs of robots. The weights of the connectivity graph depend on (i) the odometric and orientation accuracy of each robot, and (ii) the accuracy of the robot tracker on each member of the team that measures its relative position with respect to other robots in the group. The theoretical results are validated by extensive simulations.