Eugene Lo Rose Hills
Evaluation of the Localization Ability of a Commercial Off-The-Shelf Drone for Active Cooperative Localization
A key component of successfully automating robots is localization: maintaining realtime knowledge of the robots’ positions and orientations in some local environment. Tools such as GPS can achieve reasonably accurate localization via absolute position estimates (e.g. a longitude, latitude measurement), but these absolute sensors often do not work well in indoor settings due to poor reception of the signal. As more and more robots are deployed to work in indoor environments such as households and factories, cost-effective and accurate localization for indoor settings becomes vital for enabling progress and maintaining safety for both the robots and the people surrounding them. Our research explores the concept of optimization of a multi-agent system for localization. One designated primary agent uses measurements sent by the supporting agents to localize, while the supporting agents simultaneously coordinate and optimize their movements in order to be able to continue relaying the necessary information to the primary agent. My specific project will involve analyzing a commercial drone with advanced onboard sensors and evaluating how useful these capabilities are for cooperative localization with a smaller, less powerful drone.