Cooperative Navigation of UAV Formation Based on Relative Velocity and Position Assistance

Abstract

Because the navigation errors of inertial navigation system accumulate with time, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formation that only relies on inertial navigation system for positioning cannot obtain precision navigation information in long time flight. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a cooperative navigation scheme for master-slave UAV formation. First, the UAV is equipped with relative navigation sensors to measure the relative velocity and position information between the members of the master-slave UAV formation. Then, considering the relative pose of formation members, the spatial unified transformation scheme is studied. The absolute navigation information measured by each member of UAV formation by inertial navigation system and the relative navigation information measured by relative sensors is unified into the same navigation coordinate system. Finally, a cooperative navigation scheme based on relative velocity and relative position assistance is given. The 30 min simulation results show that the speed and position errors of each cluster converge to 0.1 m/s and 5 m respectively under this scheme, which is more suitable than the inertial navigation system.

Keywords

• collaborative navigation
• relative navigation
• spatial information unification
• unmanned aerial vehicle (uav)