  In this paper, we propose a general graph optimization based framework for
localization, which can accommodate different types of measurements with
varying measurement time intervals. Special emphasis will be on range-based
localization. Range and trajectory smoothness constraints are constructed in a
position graph, then the robot trajectory over a sliding window is estimated by
a graph based optimization algorithm. Moreover, convergence analysis of the
algorithm is provided, and the effects of the number of iterations and window
size in the optimization on the localization accuracy are analyzed. Extensive
experiments on quadcopter under a variety of scenarios verify the effectiveness
of the proposed algorithm and demonstrate a much higher localization accuracy
than the existing range-based localization methods, especially in the altitude
direction.
