MURP: Multi-Agent Ultra-Wideband Relative Pose Estimation with Constrained Communications in 3D Environments

Abstract

Inter-agent relative localization is critical for many multi-robot systems operating in the absence of external positioning infrastructure or prior environmental knowledge. We propose a novel inter-agent relative 3D pose estimation system where each participating agent is equipped with several ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging tags. Prior work typically supplements noisy UWB range measurements with additional continuously transmitted data (e.g., odometry) leading to potential scaling issues with increased team size and/or decreased communication network capability. By equipping each agent with multiple UWB antennas, our approach addresses these concerns by using only locally collected UWB range measurements, a priori state constraints, and event-based detections of when said constraints are violated. The addition of our learned mean ranging bias correction improves our approach by an additional 19% positional error, and gives us an overall experimental mean absolute position and heading errors of 0.24m and 9.5 degrees respectively. When compared to other state-of-the-art approaches, our work demonstrates improved performance over similar systems, while remaining competitive with methods that have significantly higher communication costs. Additionally, we make our datasets available.