A "Thermodynamic" Approach to Multi-robot Cooperative Localization with Noisy Sensors

In a previous paper [1], we proposed a new approach to the simultaneous cooperative localization of a very large group of simple robots capable of performing dead-reckoning and sensing the relative position of nearby robots. The idea behind the proposed averaging process is the following: every time two robots meet, they simply average their location estimates. This paper extends the results of [1] by considering noisy relative location measurements and by presenting a novel analysis based on the Well Mixing Movement Pattern assumption. The results of this paper are more precise than what was previously reported. Nevertheless, when considering the limit of a large group of robots, and after a long "stabilization" time, the final results turn out to be identical.