Cooperative Navigation Method Based on Adaptive CKF for UAVs in GPS Denied Areas

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), when used in a formation setting, can be more advantageous. The concerted operation of UAV formations has many potential applications, such as cooperative reconnaissance, formation combat and search and rescue in mountainous regions. Nevertheless, modern navigation systems for UAVs are not able to guarantee the precision of pose estimation when GPS is unavailable in complex environment. The IMU drifts of navigation systems can cause poor calculation accuracy of position, velocity and attitude of all UAVs in the group within dozens of seconds. To solve this problem, this paper puts forward a new cooperative navigation method based on adaptive Cubature Kalman Filter which shares the relative observations between the UAVs and fuses these data with direct measurements from IMU to obtain better navigation performance. The simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.