Multirobot Cooperative State Estimation - towards Scalability and Active Perception

The core focus of my research is on robot perception. Within this broad categorization, I am mainly interested in understanding how teams of robots and sensors can cooperate and/or collaborate to improve the perception of themselves (self-localization) as well as their surroundings (target tracking, mapping, etc.). In this talk I will describe the inter-dependencies of such perception modules and present state-of-the-art methods to perform unified cooperative state estimation. The trade-off between accuracy of estimation and computational speed will be highlighted through a new optimization-based method for unified-state estimation. Furthermore, I will also describe how perception-based multirobot formation control can be achieved. Towards the end, I will present some recent results on cooperative vision-based target tracking and a few comments on our ongoing work regarding cooperative aerial mapping with human-in-the-loop.