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S. Goel, J. Gabela, A. Kealy, G. Retscher:
"An Indoor-Outdoor Cooperative Localization Framework for UAVs";
Talk: IGNSS Conference 2018, Sydney, Australia (invited); 2018-02-07 - 2018-02-09; in: "IGNSS 2018 Conference", (2018), Paper ID 12, 15 pages.

Positioning and navigation in urban environments has been challenging due to partial unavailability of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems) measurements. The increasing availability of Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) and UWB (Ultra-Wide Band) measurements in indoor as well as outdoor urban environments provides additional measurements that could be used for localization. It has been demonstrated that sharing of information among multiple platforms can help to overcome the challenges of precise localization in GNSS challenging environments. This information sharing strategy referred to as `Cooperative Localization (CL)´ has been shown to provide superior localization solution in GNSS available environments. CL refers to simultaneous positioning of all dynamic platforms in a connected network where each node shares information about its own state and some relative information about other nodes. A CL framework that combines information exchange among multiple platforms and measurements from GNSS, UWB and Wi-Fi can potentially solve some of the positioning and navigation challenges in urban and indoor environments.
This paper develops an indoor-outdoor CL framework and a prototype for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) using low cost sensors such as MEMS (Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems) Inertial, GNSS, UWB and Wi-Fi. This system uses information exchange among multiple static nodes and dynamic nodes in both indoor and outdoor environments to achieve a seamless indoor-outdoor localization solution. Preliminary results of our ongoing efforts to develop this system indicate that proposed system can achieve accuracy of the order of ~2-5 m in challenging GNSS environments. The framework developed in this research is aimed at achieving ubiquitous positioning and may prove to be helpful in applications such as exploration, search and rescue, disaster management, situational awareness, assisted guidance and navigation, etc.

Cooperative Localization, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Wi-Fi, UWB, Extended Kalman Filter

https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_269713.pdf