Vision-Based Cooperative Pose Estimation for Localization in Multi-Robot Systems Equipped with RGB-D Cameras

We present a new vision based cooperative pose estimation scheme for systems of mobile robots equipped with RGB-D cameras. We first model a multi-robot system as an edge-weighted graph. Then, based on this model, and by using the real-time color and depth data, the robots with shared field-of-views estimate their relative poses in pairwise. The system does not need the existence of a single common view shared by all robots, and it works in 3D scenes without any specific calibration pattern or landmark. The proposed scheme distributes working loads evenly in the system, hence it is scalable and the computing power of the participating robots is efficiently used. The performance and robustness were analyzed both on synthetic and experimental data in different environments over a range of system configurations with varying number of robots and poses