Distributed Formation Estimation Via Pairwise Distance Measurements

Continuously and reliably estimating the relative configuration of robotic swarms in real-time constitutes a core functionality when pursuing autonomy such swarm. Relying on external positioning systems, as GPS or motion tracking can provide required information, but significantly limits generality an approach. In this letter, we target formation estimation for autonomous flights small UAVs, they pose particularly challenging restrictions onboard resources, while opening up large variety practical scenarios multi-robot setup. While state-of-the-art has been addressing efficient estimation, scalability remains limited to only very few agents that be handled real-time, with workload each agent depending total number Aiming scalable here propose distributed approach, where computational load is decoupled from swarm size. This approach implemented setup minimal communication effort, requiring ego-motion estimates pairwise distance measurements between them, constraining their globally. Evaluations 49 UAVs demonstrate power our handle swarms, keeping bounded individual little data exchange two robots.