Cooperative Control for Localization of Mobile Sensor Networks

Fan Zhang, University of Pennsylvania
Ben Grocholsky, University of Pennsylvania
R. Vijay Kumar, University of Pennsylvania
Max L. Mintz, University of Pennsylvania

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Postprint version. Published in Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences, Volume 309, Cooperative Control: A Post-Workshop Volume, 2003 Block Island Workshop on Cooperative Control, pages 241-256.
Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/b99788

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of cooperatively control a formation of networked mobile robots/vehicles to optimize the relative and absolute localization performance in 1D and 2D space. A framework for active perception is presented utilizing a graphical representation of sensory information obtained from the robot network. Performance measures are proposed that capture the estimate quality of team localization. We show that these measures directly depend on the sensing graph and shape of the formation. This dependence motivates implementation of a gradient based control scheme to adapt the formation geometry in order to optimize team localization performance. This approach is illustrated through application to a cooperative target localization problem involving a small robot team. Simulation results are presented using experimentally validated noise models.