Maintaining a common coordinate system for a group of robots based on vision

This work presents a novel approach to the problem of establishing and maintaining a common coordinate system for a group of robots. A camera system mounted on top of a robot and vision algorithms are used to calculate the relative position of each surrounding robot. The watched movement of each robot is compared to the reported movement which is sent over some communication link. From this comparison a coordinate transformation is calculated. The algorithm was tested in simulation and is at the moment being implemented on a real robot system. Preliminary results of real world experiments are being presented.