Multi-Robot Collaborative Localization Methods Based on Wireless Sensor Network

Autonomous mobile robots are required to know precisely their position and orientation in order to successfully perform their mission. Since multi-robots collaboration has outstanding advantages, multi-robot collaborative localization method has been studied widely in recent years, but robots should have high performance in this method. As wireless sensors became smaller and cheaper in the recent years, applications with many nodes for tracking and monitoring are now feasible. The process of localization based on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) depends on estimating the position of the features within the environment. However, this method's localization accuracy is not satisfactory. So a new localization method is presented that multi-robot collaborative localization was combined with localization technology of WSN. This kind of combination method hasn't been introduced before. The combination method uses WSN to calculate the position of the tracked robot first, and then applies a particle filter based estimator for tracking and building of the robot model. The distance measured in WSN is calculated based on received signal strength indicators (RSSI), and particle filter is used to realize multi-robot collaborative localization. The efficacy of this approach is shown by simulation. The simulation results show that the algorithm works well. Furthermore, it can achieve comparable or better localization than some existing methods.