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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22006 |
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| _version_ | 1866917299542294528 |
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| author | Lu, Jiadong Li, Zhehan Han, Tao Xu, Miao Xu, Chao Cao, Yanjun |
| author_facet | Lu, Jiadong Li, Zhehan Han, Tao Xu, Miao Xu, Chao Cao, Yanjun |
| contents | Accurate relative localization is critical for multi-robot cooperation. In robot swarms, measurements from different robots arrive asynchronously and with clock time-offsets. Although Continuous-Time (CT) formulations have proved effective for handling asynchronous measurements in single-robot SLAM and calibration, extending CT methods to multi-robot settings faces great challenges to achieve high-accuracy, low-latency, and high-frequency performance. Especially, existing CT methods suffer from the inherent query-time delay of unclamped B-splines and high computational cost. This paper proposes CT-RIO, a novel Continuous-Time Relative-Inertial Odometry framework. We employ Clamped Non-Uniform B-splines (C-NUBS) to represent robot states for the first time, eliminating the query-time delay. We further augment C-NUBS with closed-form extension and shrinkage operations that preserve the spline shape, making it suitable for online estimation and enabling flexible knot management. This flexibility leads to the concept of knot-keyknot strategy, which supports spline extension at high-frequency while retaining sparse keyknots for adaptive relative-motion modeling. We then formulate a sliding-window relative localization problem that operates purely on relative kinematics and inter-robot constraints. To meet the demanding computation required at swarm scale, we decompose the tightly-coupled optimization into robot-wise sub-problems and solve them in parallel using incremental asynchronous block coordinate descent. Extensive experiments show that CT-RIO converges from time-offsets as large as 263 ms to sub-millisecond within 3 s, and achieves RMSEs of 0.046 m and 1.8 °. It consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with improvements of up to 60% under high-speed motion. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_22006 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Parallel Continuous-Time Relative Localization with Augmented Clamped Non-Uniform B-Splines Lu, Jiadong Li, Zhehan Han, Tao Xu, Miao Xu, Chao Cao, Yanjun Robotics Accurate relative localization is critical for multi-robot cooperation. In robot swarms, measurements from different robots arrive asynchronously and with clock time-offsets. Although Continuous-Time (CT) formulations have proved effective for handling asynchronous measurements in single-robot SLAM and calibration, extending CT methods to multi-robot settings faces great challenges to achieve high-accuracy, low-latency, and high-frequency performance. Especially, existing CT methods suffer from the inherent query-time delay of unclamped B-splines and high computational cost. This paper proposes CT-RIO, a novel Continuous-Time Relative-Inertial Odometry framework. We employ Clamped Non-Uniform B-splines (C-NUBS) to represent robot states for the first time, eliminating the query-time delay. We further augment C-NUBS with closed-form extension and shrinkage operations that preserve the spline shape, making it suitable for online estimation and enabling flexible knot management. This flexibility leads to the concept of knot-keyknot strategy, which supports spline extension at high-frequency while retaining sparse keyknots for adaptive relative-motion modeling. We then formulate a sliding-window relative localization problem that operates purely on relative kinematics and inter-robot constraints. To meet the demanding computation required at swarm scale, we decompose the tightly-coupled optimization into robot-wise sub-problems and solve them in parallel using incremental asynchronous block coordinate descent. Extensive experiments show that CT-RIO converges from time-offsets as large as 263 ms to sub-millisecond within 3 s, and achieves RMSEs of 0.046 m and 1.8 °. It consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with improvements of up to 60% under high-speed motion. |
| title | Parallel Continuous-Time Relative Localization with Augmented Clamped Non-Uniform B-Splines |
| topic | Robotics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22006 |