Centralized-Equivalent Pairwise Estimation with Asynchronous Communication Constraints for two Robots

Abstract

Collaboratively estimating the state of two robots under communication constraints is challenging regarding computational complexity and statistical optimality. Previous work only achieves practical solutions by either disregarding parts of the measurements or imposing a communication overhead, being non-optimal or not entirely distributed, respectively. In this work, we present a centralized-equivalent but dis-tributed approach for pairwise state estimation where two agents only communicate when they meet. Our approach utilizes elements from wave scattering theory to efficiently and consistently summarize (pre-compute) past estimator information (i.e., state evolution and uncertainty) between encounters of two agents. This summarized information is then used in a joint correction step taking into account all past information of each agent in a statistically correct way. This novel approach enables us to distribute the pre-computations of both state evolution and uncertainties on the agents and reconstruct the centralized-equivalent system estimate with very few computations once the agents meet again while still applying all measurements from both agents on both estimates upon encounter. We compare our approach on a real-world dataset against a state of the art collaborative state estimation approach.