Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Positioning Based on Hybrid Robust Gaussian Belief Propagation

This paper proposes a hybrid robust Gaussian belief propagation (HRGBP) as a fault-tolerant cooperative positioning (CP) system that can be used to support cooperative intelligent transportation applications. For fault-tolerant state estimation, it is well known that fault detection and exclusion (FDE) based methods and Huber’s M-estimation based methods have their own drawbacks when facing different forms of observation outliers, or faults. To solve this problem, our proposed HRGBP uses an interactive multiple model (IMM) framework to fuse these two strategies, which combines the advantages of both methods without their drawbacks. HRGBP can fully exploit the message passing process to mitigate the biased estimates, which further improves the system’s fault-tolerant robustness. HRGBP can be further adapted to fuse more fault-tolerant strategies to improve the robustness of the CP system, and be extended to other factor graph-based methods. Here, we evaluate HRGBP for observations from visual landmark range and bearing, neighboring vehicle range and bearing, and odometer. Our evaluations show that HRGBP outperforms other state-of-the-art CP methods.