Fault tolerant multi-robot cooperative localization based on covariance union

This paper studies the multi-robot cooperative localization (CL) problem, a challenging scenario in which robots may receive spurious sensor data, potentially causing inconsistent state estimates. To address this problem, this paper presents a fully decentralized CL algorithm based on covariance union (CU), referred to as DCL-CU. The proposed approach is fault-tolerant and supports generic measurement models. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations and a group of real-world experiments were conducted to verify the performance of the proposed DCL-CU approach. The results show that the DCL-CU approach can efficiently deal with spurious sensor data.