Recovering Relative Orientation And Scale From Visual Odometry And Ranging Radio Measurements

In this paper we propose a new approach to recovering the relative position and orientation of a pair of platforms moving on the plane by fusing the kinds of estimates provided by visual odometry systems with distance measurements obtained from ranging radio systems. By combining these two complementary sources of information we are able to provide estimates that could not be obtained using either source separately. We show that the localization problem can be phrased as an optimization problem where we are interested in maximizing a convex function subject to a set of convex constraints and we propose an efficient and effective solution scheme that leverages the structure of the problem. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed method performs creditably on actual robotic platforms.