We report two decentralized multi-agent cooperative localization algorithms
in which, to reduce the communication cost, inter-agent state estimate
correlations are not maintained but accounted for implicitly. In our first
algorithm, to guarantee filter consistency, we account for unknown inter-agent
correlations via an upper bound on the joint covariance matrix of the agents.
In the second method, we use an optimization framework to estimate the unknown
inter-agent cross-covariance matrix. In our algorithms, each agent localizes
itself in a global coordinate frame using a local filter driven by local dead
reckoning and occasional absolute measurement updates, and opportunistically
corrects its pose estimate whenever it can obtain relative measurements with
respect to other mobile agents. To process any relative measurement, only the
agent taken the measurement and the agent the measurement is taken from need to
communicate with each other. Consequently, our algorithms are decentralized
algorithms that do not impose restrictive network-wide connectivity condition.
Moreover, we make no assumptions about the type of agents or relative
measurements. We demonstrate our algorithms in simulation and a
robotic~experiment.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure