Multi-Robot Cooperative Navigation with Active Sensing in a GPS-Denied Environment

Shahbaz P. Qadri Syed and He Bai

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	We consider a cooperative navigation problem for a group of robots in a GPS-denied environment. It is well known that using only odometry measurements leads to drift in localization. However, it is possible to leverage inter-robot measurements and reduce the localization drift. In this paper, we assume that in addition to odometry information, each robot measures its relative range to others prescribed by a measurement graph. We aim to create active sensing strategies that improve cooperative localization performance with access to only the range and odometry measurements. Motivated by the popular factor graph-based smoothing and mapping framework, we propose a metric to measure the quality of a path for cooperative navigation. We design an active sensing algorithm based on model predictive control to optimize such a metric. From our Monte-Carlo simulation results, the active sensing algorithm reduces the localization uncertainty and outperforms baseline algorithms. Index Terms—Multi-robot systems, GPS-denied navigation, Inertial navigation, Active sensing, Smoothing.
Published in:	2025 IEEE/ION Position, Location and Navigation Symposium (PLANS) April 28 - 1, 2025 Salt Lake Marriott Downtown at City Creek Salt Lake City, UT
Pages:	180 - 187
Cite this article:	Syed, Shahbaz P. Qadri, Bai, He, "Multi-Robot Cooperative Navigation with Active Sensing in a GPS-Denied Environment," 2025 IEEE/ION Position, Location and Navigation Symposium (PLANS), Salt Lake City, UT, April 2025, pp. 180-187.
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