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A. Kealy, S. Goel, G. Retscher, V. Gikas, C. Toth, D. Grejner-Brzezinska, B. Lohani:
"Cooperative Localization of Unmanned Aerial Systems Using Low Cost GNSS and MEMS Inertial Sensors";
Talk: 9th International Symposium on Mobile Mapping Technology, Sydney (invited); 2015-12-09 - 2015-12-11; in: "9th International Symposium on Mobile Mapping Technology", (2015), Paper ID 79, 11 pages.

Networks of small, low cost Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) have the potential to improve responsiveness and situational awareness across an increasing number of applications including defense, surveillance, mapping, search and rescue, disaster management, mineral exploration, assisted guidance and navigation etc. These ad hoc networks of UASs typically have the capability to communicate with each other and can share data between the individual UAS nodes. In doing this, these networks can operate as robust and efficient information acquisition platforms by implementing real-time network querying and decentralized, in-network processing techniques. For any of the applications involving UASs, a primary requirement is the localization i.e. determining the position and orientation of the UAV. The performance requirements of localization can vary with individual applications, for example: mapping applications need much higher localization accuracy as compared to the applications involving only surveillance. The sharing of appropriate data between UASs can prove to be advantageous when compared to a single UAV, in terms of improving the positioning accuracy and reliability particularly in partially or completely GNSS denied environments. This research aims to integrate low cost positioning sensors and cooperative localization technique for a network of UASs. Our hypothesis is that it is possible to achieve high accurate, real-time localization of each of the nodes in the network even with cheaper sensors if the nodes of the network share information among themselves. The first phase of the research includes simulation studies and simulation experiments to verify the correctness of our mathematical framework for decentralized localization of networks of UASs. The second phase of the research includes experimental validation in real world scenarios to study the effectiveness, correctness and performance of the proposed mathematical framework and developed integration mechanism when operated under real world conditions. In this paper we present the overall mathematical framework developed in phase 1. We also present results obtained that examines the computational efficiency of the algorithm and evaluates its overall accuracy. We will then outline our plans for practical experiments under Phase 2 to further evaluate and adapt this mathematical framework.

Cooperative Localization, Unmanned Aerial System, Extended Kalman Filter, Covariance Intersection, Centralized fusion, Decentralized fusion