Ultra-wideband and odometry-based cooperative relative localization with application to multi-UAV formation control

This puts forth an infrastructure-free cooperative relative localization (RL) for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in global positioning system (GPS)-denied environments. Instead of estimating relative coordinates with vision-based methods, an onboard ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging and communication (RCM) network is adopted to both sense the inter-UAV distance and exchange information for RL estimation in 2-D spaces. Without any external infrastructures prepositioned, each agent cooperatively performs a consensus-based fusion, which fuses the obtained direct and indirect RL estimates, to generate the relative positions to its neighbors in real time despite the fact that some UAVs may not have direct range measurements to their neighbors. The proposed RL estimation is then applied to formation control. Extensive simulations and real-world flight tests corroborate the merits of the developed RL algorithm.