Robust Positioning with a Multi-Agent Robotic System

A collection of interacting autonomous robots can deene a local coordinate system with respect to one another without reference to environmental features. This simpliies tasks requiring robots to occupy or traverse a set of positions in the environment, such as mapping, conveyance and search. We argue for an approach to positioning in which sensing errors remain localized, and dead-reckoning plays no role. This involves a robot-based representation for the environment, in which metric information is used locally to determine the relative positions of neighbouring robots, but the global map is a graph, capturing the neighbour relations among the robots. We show that many tasks can be solved without reference to a global coordinate system, but that global metric maps may be constructed as desired, with small errors in the vicinity of any chosen position.