In order to improve the localization accuracy of multi-robot systems, a cooperative localization approach with communication delays was proposed in this paper. In the proposed method, the reason for the time delay of the robots’ cooperative localization approach was analyzed first, and then the state equation and measure equation were reconstructed by introducing the communication delays into the states and measurements. Furthermore, the cooperative localization algorithm using the extended Kalman filtering technique based on state estimation error compensation was proposed to reduce the state estimation error of delay filtering. Finally, the simulation and experiment results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm can achieve good performance in location in the presence of communication delay while having reduced computational and communicative cost.
A “thermodynamic” approach to multi-robot cooperative localization