Introduction of Collaborative State Estimation for Multiple Agents into a Thermal/Visual-Inertial State Estimation Framework(NPO-52198-1)

This software is a modification to the X framework that enable multi robot collaboration.It adds a communication class that make the program able to exchange messages with other agents in the network. It extends the MSCKF update class to work with collaborative MSCKF updates, by using the new Covariance Intersection class. It implements a multi SLAM class to handle collaborative SLAM updates. Moreover, to use the data coming from the other robots the program implement a place recognition class that creates the messages needed by the collaborative update methods.The software also includes a third party code, that we slightly modified to perform photometric calibration of thermal images.To use this software, use the same settings as the original version of X, example configuration files for setting the parameters are included in the repository. Note that to run a multi drone system using the ROS wrapper, the vio_multi.launch file must be used. The number of UAVs the program have to run can be specified by using "vio_multi.launch nr:=#ofUAVs"