Analysis of Indistinguishable Trajectories of a Nonholonomic Vehicle Subject to Range Measurements

We propose a global constructibility analysis for a vehicle moving on a planar surface. Assuming that the vehicle follows a trajectory that can be uniquely identified by the sequence of control inputs and by some intermittent ranging measurements from known points in the environment, we can model the trajectory as a rigid body subject to rotation and translation in the plane. This way, the localization problem can be reduced to finding the conditions for the existence of a unique roto-translation of the trajectory from a known reference frame to the world reference frame, given the collected measurements. As discussed in this article, such conditions can be expressed in terms of the shape of the trajectory, of the layout of the ranging sensors, and of the numbers of measurements collected from each of them. The approach applies to a large class of kinematic models. Focusing on the special case of unicycle kinematics, we provide additional local constructibility results.