Multi-Robot Localization based on Bayesian Multidimensional Scaling

This paper presents a multi-robot localization based on Bayesian Multidimensional Scaling (BMDS). We propose a robust MDS to handle both the incomplete and noisy data, which is applied to solve the multi-robot localization problem. To deal with the incomplete data, we use the Nystr${\ddot{o}}$m approximation which approximates the full distance matrix. To deal with the uncertainty, we formulate a Bayesian framework for MDS which finds the posterior of coordinates of objects by means of statistical inference. We not only verify the performance of MDS-based multi-robot localization by computer simulations, but also implement a real world localization of multi-robot team. Using extensive empirical results, we show that the accuracy of the proposed method is almost similar to that of Monte Carlo Localization(MCL).