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S. Goel, A. Kealy, B. Lohani, G. Retscher:
"A Cooperative Localization System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Prototype Development and Analysis";
Talk: 10th International Symposium on Mobile Mapping Technology, Kairo, Ägypten (invited); 2017-05-06 - 2017-05-08; in: "International Symposium on Mobile Mapping Technology", (2017), 7 pages.

Cooperative localization (CL) has long been studied especially in the domain of wireless sensor networks and has been found to provide superior localization accuracy under certain conditions but has been limited to static networks. It has been demonstrated that cooperative localization can prove to be especially helpful in GNSS challenging environments where some nodes of a cooperative network may not have access to GNSS. Further, using numerical simulations it has been demonstrated that information sharing in a cooperative network helps all the nodes and can improve the localization accuracy even in GNSS available environments. With this motivation, this paper explains the development of a cooperative localization system for UAVs developed at The University of Melbourne, Australia. This paper provides details of the mathematical framework implemented in the developed system and includes details of the mechanism involved for integrating several sensors and components for developing the complete system. The developed system integrates low cost GNSS, MEMS Inertial sensors, Ultra-Wide Band sensor and raspberry pi with UAVs to develop a cooperative swarm capable of operating in partially GNSS denied environments. Specifically, this prototype pertains to Peer to Infrastructure (P2I) localization strategy in which a swarm of UAVs rely on static nodes for localization. The mathematical framework and the developed prototype is validated using multiple real world experiments. Experimental results indicate that navigation level accuracies (~4 m) can be achieved in GNSS challenging environments using the developed cooperative network.

Cooperative Localization, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Ultra-Wide Band Sensor, P2I Localization