1 research outputs found
Optimal Spatial-Temporal Triangulation for Bearing-Only Cooperative Motion Estimation
Vision-based cooperative motion estimation is an important problem for many
multi-robot systems such as cooperative aerial target pursuit. This problem can
be formulated as bearing-only cooperative motion estimation, where the visual
measurement is modeled as a bearing vector pointing from the camera to the
target. The conventional approaches for bearing-only cooperative estimation are
mainly based on the framework distributed Kalman filtering (DKF). In this
paper, we propose a new optimal bearing-only cooperative estimation algorithm,
named spatial-temporal triangulation, based on the method of distributed
recursive least squares, which provides a more flexible framework for designing
distributed estimators than DKF. The design of the algorithm fully incorporates
all the available information and the specific triangulation geometric
constraint. As a result, the algorithm has superior estimation performance than
the state-of-the-art DKF algorithms in terms of both accuracy and convergence
speed as verified by numerical simulation. We rigorously prove the exponential
convergence of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, to verify the effectiveness of
the proposed algorithm under practical challenging conditions, we develop a
vision-based cooperative aerial target pursuit system, which is the first of
such fully autonomous systems so far to the best of our knowledge