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Main Authors: Tu, Chenxin, Cui, Xiaowei, Liu, Gang, Lu, Mingquan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12207
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author Tu, Chenxin
Cui, Xiaowei
Liu, Gang
Lu, Mingquan
author_facet Tu, Chenxin
Cui, Xiaowei
Liu, Gang
Lu, Mingquan
contents Cooperative localization is considered a key solution for enabling autonomous navigation of multi-vehicle systems (MVS) in GNSS-denied environments. Among all solutions, distributed cooperative localization (DCL) has garnered widespread attention due to its robustness and scalability, making it well-suited for large-scale MVS. To address the challenge of untrackable state correlations between vehicles in a distributed framework, covariance intersection (CI) has been introduced as a means to fuse relative measurements under unknown correlations. However, existing studies treat CI merely as a plug-in method, applying traditional optimization criteria directly and focusing only on simple two-dimensional (2D) scenarios. When directly extended to three-dimensional (3D) scenarios with more complex state space (higher dimensions, additional state components, and significant disparities in scale and observability among state components), traditional methods fail to achieve balanced state estimation across all state components, leading to a significant degradation in the estimation accuracy of some state components. This highlights the need to design specialized mechanisms to improve the data fusion process. In this paper, we introduce a weighting mechanism, namely the weighted covariance intersection (WCI), to regulate the fusion process of CI. A concurrent fusion strategy for multiple distance measurements and a dedicated weighting matrix based on the error propagation rule of the inertial navigation system (INS) are developed for the data fusion process in DCL. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed WCI significantly enhances cooperative localization performance compared to traditional CI, while the distributed approach outperforms the centralized approach in terms of robustness and scalability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_12207
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Weighted Covariance Intersection for Range-based Distributed Cooperative Localization of Multi-Vehicle Systems
Tu, Chenxin
Cui, Xiaowei
Liu, Gang
Lu, Mingquan
Signal Processing
Cooperative localization is considered a key solution for enabling autonomous navigation of multi-vehicle systems (MVS) in GNSS-denied environments. Among all solutions, distributed cooperative localization (DCL) has garnered widespread attention due to its robustness and scalability, making it well-suited for large-scale MVS. To address the challenge of untrackable state correlations between vehicles in a distributed framework, covariance intersection (CI) has been introduced as a means to fuse relative measurements under unknown correlations. However, existing studies treat CI merely as a plug-in method, applying traditional optimization criteria directly and focusing only on simple two-dimensional (2D) scenarios. When directly extended to three-dimensional (3D) scenarios with more complex state space (higher dimensions, additional state components, and significant disparities in scale and observability among state components), traditional methods fail to achieve balanced state estimation across all state components, leading to a significant degradation in the estimation accuracy of some state components. This highlights the need to design specialized mechanisms to improve the data fusion process. In this paper, we introduce a weighting mechanism, namely the weighted covariance intersection (WCI), to regulate the fusion process of CI. A concurrent fusion strategy for multiple distance measurements and a dedicated weighting matrix based on the error propagation rule of the inertial navigation system (INS) are developed for the data fusion process in DCL. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed WCI significantly enhances cooperative localization performance compared to traditional CI, while the distributed approach outperforms the centralized approach in terms of robustness and scalability.
title Weighted Covariance Intersection for Range-based Distributed Cooperative Localization of Multi-Vehicle Systems
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12207