3-D mutual localization with anonymous bearing measurements

Abstract — We present a decentralized algorithm for estimat-ing mutual 3-D poses in a group of mobile robots, such as a team of UAVs. Our algorithm uses bearing measurements reconstructed, e.g., by a visual sensor, and inertial measure-ments coming from the robot IMU. Since identification of a specific robot in a group would require visual tagging and may be cumbersome in practice, we simply assume that the bear-ing measurements are anonymous. The proposed localization method is a non-trivial extension of our previous algorithm for the 2-D case [1], and exhibits similar performance and robustness. An experimental validation of the algorithm has been performed using quadrotor UAVs. I