Necessary and sufficient conditions for localization of multiple robot platforms

In this paper, we consider the problem of cooperatively localizing a formation of networked robots/vehicles in SE(2). First, we propose necessary and sufficient conditions to establish when a team of robots with heterogeneous sensors can be localized. We then show how these conditions are analogous to well-known results in the literature on kinematics of planar mechanisms. We show how localization is equivalent to solving a system of nonlinear closure equations. Depending on what sensors are available for each robot, the multirobot formation can be modeled as a sensing graph consisting of vertices representing robots and edges corresponding to sensory information. We establish conditions that must be satisfied by this graph and show how this graph influences estimates of positions and orientations of the robots in a team through experiments and simulations.