This paper addresses the problem of decentralized, collaborative state estimation in robotic teams. In particular, this paper considers problems where individual robots estimate similar physical quantities, such as each other's position relative to themselves. The use of pseudomeasurements is introduced as a means of modelling such relationships between robots' state estimates, and is shown to be a tractable way to approach the decentralized state estimation problem. Moreover, this formulation easily leads to a general-purpose observability test that simultaneously accounts for measurements that robots collect from their own sensors, as well as the communication structure within the team. Finally, input preintegration is proposed as a communication-efficient way of sharing odometry information between robots, and the entire theory is appropriate for both vector-space and Lie-group state definitions. The proposed framework is evaluated on three different simulated problems, and one experiment involving three quadcopters.

翻译：本文研究了机器人团队中的去中心化协同状态估计问题。特别地，本文考虑了各机器人估计相似物理量（例如彼此相对位置）的场景。引入伪测量作为建模机器人状态估计间此类关系的手段，并证明这是处理去中心化状态估计问题的可行方法。此外，该公式能自然推导出通用可观测性检验，该检验可同时考虑机器人自身传感器收集的测量值以及团队内部的通信结构。最后，提出输入预积分作为机器人间共享里程计信息的通信高效方式，整套理论适用于向量空间和李群状态定义。所提框架在三个不同仿真问题及一个涉及三架四旋翼飞行器的实验中进行了评估。