Multi-Robot Bearing-only Pose Estimation via Angle Rigidity

Abstract:This letter proposes a novel distributed bearing-based pose estimator for time-varying multi-robot systems. The method uses angles computed from body-frame bearings to estimate the robots' positions in $\mathbb{R}^3$ without knowledge of their orientations. The orientations in $\mathrm{SO}(3)$ are recovered from the estimated positions, the bearings, and the bearing derivatives. The proposed observer only requires the (directed) sensing topology to be \textit{angle-rigid}, a weaker condition than the commonly used ones like bearing rigidity. Local uniform exponential stability of the proposed observer is established under the assumption of persistently exciting motions for a subset of robots. Simulations are presented and discussed to evaluate the scheme's effectiveness and practicality.

Robotics (cs.RO); Systems and Control (eess.SY)

arXiv:2606.03931 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2606.03931v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.03931 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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