ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the description of the system model and the problem formulation and considers a scenario where vehicles use a communication network to exchange range-only measurements to improve localization. Autonomous vehicles moving in a common unstructured area can opportunistically measure their relative distances through time-of-flight techniques associated with the acoustic/electromagnetic signals exchanged for communicating. The presented multi-vehicle relative localization technique has been tested through several numerical experiments. The proposed navigation solution may be applied to different scenarios involving vehicles possibly moving on land, in water, or in air. Building on a single range localization solution described in for a single vehicle, a cooperative localization filter has been proposed for a networked group of vehicles. The geometric constraints provide additional information with respect to the available measurements and to the state equations, hence they are able to improve the performance of the estimation by reducing the estimate covariance.
