High-Precision Collaborative Relative Navigation Method for Multiple Aircraft Based on Geometric Topology Constraints

Abstract

Multiple aircraft formation has strong multi operation capability, high reliability and high overall efficiency, which is an important direction for the future development of aviation field. High-precision relative navigation is crucial for multiple aircraft to achieve formation flight. In order to achieve high-precision relative navigation, the existing methods usually increase the relative navigation accuracy by adding the types of navigation sensors or improving the measurement accuracy of navigation sensors. However, this not only leads to an increase in the cost and volume of the relative navigation system, but also leads to an increase in the system complexity. Therefore, based on the overall geometry topology structure of the formation, a formation geometric topology constraint model is established and introduced into the estimation of the relative inertial navigation errors in this paper. A collaborative relative navigation method based on geometric topology constraints is proposed. By introducing the geometric topology information of the whole formation, the proposed method can improve the relative navigation accuracy without increasing the configuration of navigation sensors. On this basis, a high-precision collaborative relative navigation scheme for multiple aircraft is designed. The simulation results show that the proposed method has higher relative navigation accuracy than the existing method, and the mean squared errors of relative attitude determination, relative positioning and relative velocity measurement are reduced by more than 66.48%, 48.73% and 69.53%, respectively. The proposed method can achieve high-precision relative navigation for multiple aircraft.

Keywords

• |multiple aircraft formation|aviation field|geometric topology constraints|collaborative relative navigation|high precision