Multi-Robot Localization and Target Tracking with Connectivity Maintenance and Collision Avoidance

Rahul Zahroof, Jiazhen Liu, Lifeng Zhou, Vijay Kumar

Abstract: We study the problem that requires a team of robots to perform joint localization and target tracking tasks while ensuring team connectivity and collision avoidance. The problem can be formalized as a nonlinear, non-convex optimization program, which is typically hard to solve. To this end, we design a two-staged approach that utilizes a greedy algorithm to optimize the joint localization and target tracking performance and applies control barrier functions to ensure safety constraints, i.e., maintaining connectivity of the robot team and preventing inter-robot collisions. Simulated Gazebo experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We further compare our greedy algorithm to a nonlinear optimization solver and a random algorithm, in terms of the joint localization and tracking quality as well as the computation time. The results demonstrate that our greedy algorithm achieves high task quality and runs efficiently.