Cooperative localization by dual foot-mounted inertial sensors and inter-agent ranging

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable, low-cost cooperative localization system using dual foot-mounted inertial sensors and inter-agent ranging, employing a decentralized architecture and advanced sensor fusion techniques to enable real-time group positioning.

Contribution

It introduces a partially decentralized system architecture with efficient sensor fusion methods, reducing computational and communication costs for cooperative localization of multiple agents.

Findings

Achieves two orders of magnitude reduction in computational and communication costs.

Demonstrates effective real-time localization with simulations and actual system implementation.

Enables joint global state estimation for platoon-sized groups of agents.

Abstract

The implementation challenges of cooperative localization by dual foot-mounted inertial sensors and inter-agent ranging are discussed and work on the subject is reviewed. System architecture and sensor fusion are identified as key challenges. A partially decentralized system architecture based on step-wise inertial navigation and step-wise dead reckoning is presented. This architecture is argued to reduce the computational cost and required communication bandwidth by around two orders of magnitude while only giving negligible information loss in comparison with a naive centralized implementation. This makes a joint global state estimation feasible for up to a platoon-sized group of agents. Furthermore, robust and low-cost sensor fusion for the considered setup, based on state space transformation and marginalization, is presented. The transformation and marginalization are used to give the necessary flexibility for presented sampling based updates for the inter-agent ranging and ranging free fusion of the two feet of an individual agent. Finally, characteristics of the suggested implementation are demonstrated with simulations and a real-time system implementation.