Fast Swarming of UAVs in GNSS-Denied Feature-Poor Environments Without Explicit Communication

Jiri Horyna*, Vit Kratky, Vaclav Pritzl, Tomas Baca, Eliseo Ferrante, Martin Saska

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

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Abstract

A decentralized swarm approach for the fast cooperative flight of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in feature-poor environments without any external localization and communication is introduced in this letter. A novel model of a UAV neighborhood is proposed to achieve robust onboard mutual perception and flocking state feedback control, which is designed to decrease the inter-agent oscillations common in standard reactive swarm models employed in fast collective motion. The novel swarming methodology is supplemented with an enhanced Multi-Robot State Estimation (MRSE) strategy to increase the reliability of the purely onboard localization, which may be unreliable in real environments. Although MRSE and the neighborhood model may rely on information exchange between agents, we introduce a communication-less version of the swarming framework based on estimating communicated states to decrease dependence on the often unreliable communication networks of large swarms. The proposed solution has been verified by a set of complex real-world experiments to demonstrate its overall capability in different conditions, including a UAV interception-motivated task with a group velocity reaching the physical limits of the individual hardware platforms.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)5284-5291
Number of pages8
JournalIEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Volume9
Issue number6
Early online date25 Apr 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.

Keywords

  • Distributed robot systems
  • sensor fusion
  • swarm robotics

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