Distributed Localization of Multi-Agent Systems Based on Local Bearing Information

This work addresses localizability of local-bearing-based directed multi-agent systems, which are more general but also more challenging than bearing-based undirected one. By using the local bearing measurement information, an orientation estimation algorithm is proposed, which does not require relative orientation measurements. Combined with the orientation estimation, a distributed localization estimation scheme is proposed to solve the problems of multi-agent systems absolute localization estimation. The global convergence analysis is derived based on the cascade system. A distinctive advantage of the proposed distributed estimation scheme is that it can be adopted to realize accurate orientation and absolute position estimation merely using the local bearing measurements. Several numerical simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.