Trilateration localization for multi-robot teams

The ability of robots to quickly and accurately localize their neighbors is extremely important for robotic teams. Prior approaches typically rely either on global information provided by GPS, beacons and landmarks, or on complex local information provided by vision systems. In this paper we describe our trilateration approach to multi-robot localization, which is fully distributed, inexpensive, and scalable (Heil, 2004). Our prior research (Spears et. al, 2006) focused on maintaining multi-robot formations indoors using trilateration. This paper pushes the limits of our trilateration technology by testing formations of robots in an outdoor setting at larger inter-robot distances and higher speeds.