Experiments in Decentralized Multivehicle Localization Using Ultra-Wideband Transceivers

This paper presents an experimental study of a decentralized solution for collaborative multivehicle localization in GNSS-denied environments using an unscented Kalman filter (UKF). By placing two ultra-wideband (UWB) transceivers on each uncrewed ground vehicle and having vehicles communicate only odometry information, robots are able to act as mobile landmarks for each other. World-frame and relative-frame formulations are presented. Both versions were tested using DWM1001C UWB transceivers and three Clearpath Husky robots. The world-frame filter was found to outperform dead reckoning in most instances, however in some cases poor odometry in one robot resulted in reduced performance for other robots in the system. Results for the relative formulation demonstrated an average improvement of 71.8% in RMSE over dead reckoning.