Abstract
This paper tackles the problem of formation reconstruction for a team of vehicles based on the knowledge of the range between agents of a subset of the participants. One main peculiarity of the proposed approach is that the relative velocity between agents, which is a fundamental data to solve the problem, is not assumed to be known in advance neither directly communicated. For the purpose of estimating this quantity, a collaborative control protocol is designed in order to mount the velocity data in the motion of each vehicle as a parameter through a dedicated control protocol, so that it can be inferred from the motion of the neighbor agents. Moreover, some suitable geometrical constraints related to the agents' relative positions are built and explicitly taken into account in the estimation framework providing a more accurate estimate. The issue of the presence of delays in the transmitted signals is also studied and two possible solutions are provided explaining how it is possible to get a reasonable range data exchange to get the solution both in a centralized fashion and in a decentralized one. Numerical examples are presented corroborating the validity of the proposed approach.
Highlights
Localization is one of the most important basic abilities for an autonomous vehicle to perform autonomously a wide number of tasks (Ferri et al, 2017; Simetti et al, 2017; Antonelli et al, 2018), so that an accurate and reliable localization algorithm is a key practical tool for the success of mission in many applications of underwater robotics.In essence, the localization problem is often addressed exploiting geometrical relations between the pose of the vehicle and the sensors, so that the issue of solving the localization problem may be strongly related to the environment of the given application
Sensor technology strongly depends on the environment, e.g., the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), Attitude Heading Reference Systems (AHRS), radar-based tracking systems, accelerometers, gyros, and compass devices
This makes the issue of the underwater localization problem more challenging, and it has been considerably studied in the past years
Summary
Localization is one of the most important basic abilities for an autonomous vehicle to perform autonomously a wide number of tasks (Ferri et al, 2017; Simetti et al, 2017; Antonelli et al, 2018), so that an accurate and reliable localization algorithm is a key practical tool for the success of mission in many applications of underwater robotics. Sensor technology strongly depends on the environment, e.g., the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), Attitude Heading Reference Systems (AHRS), radar-based tracking systems, accelerometers, gyros, and compass devices This makes the issue of the underwater localization problem more challenging, and it has been considerably studied in the past years. Collaborative Control Protocols for Range-Based Navigation peculiar problem in the research area of localization, which has been recently considered by several authors for its importance in various applications. In Sarras et al (2017), the authors adopt an observer-based approach to treat the problem of multi-vehicle collaborative localization using time-varying range and relative velocity measurements, while in Halsted and Schwager (2017) a method of estimating the shape of an indoor environment using the echos of acoustic pulses among the robots is studied.
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