Distributed Collaborative State Estimat...

This paper emphasis the role of Collaborative State Estimation (CSE) for reliable navigation and sensing in heterogeneous swarms of communicating robots. By using a state-of-the-art CSE algorithm, communication and maintenance of interdependencies is mainly needed for the moment of joint observations, while the credibility and performance of the distributed estimators remain closely to the statistically optimal centralized solution. In simulation we demonstrate the concept of sensor sharing to improve the localization accuracy and sensor relaying in case of sensor failure in an exploration scenario, rendering CSE as a key for reliable sensing in swarms of communicating robots.