Swarming aircraft collaborative localization based on mutual rangings

In the environment of net-centric war, collaborative localization based on mutual ranges is proposed to improve the inertial positioning accuracy of the swarming aircraft when global positioning system (GPS) is unbelievable. The collaborative localization system, which was mainly composed of the inter-flight data link and the inertial system, was designed and the ranging scheme as well as the time synchronization problem were analyzed. The polygon translation-rotation method was applied to estimate the inertial positioning errors. Simulation results show that the polygon translation-rotation method slows down the divergence speed of the inertial positioning errors effectively and the inertial navigation accuracy is about 2 times of the original level with the help of collaborative localization for the five aircraft swarming.