A cooperative navigation system of multiple quadrotor aerial vehicles: design, development and performance

Abstract

This paper proposes a multiple quadrotor aerial vehicles (QAVs) cooperative navigation system, emphasizes on its design, development and its performance. First, the QAV's hardware platform is presented in details, which consists of Zig-Bee module, Ultra Wide Band (UWB) module, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver, the flight controller Pixhawk integrated with inertial measurement unit (IMU), and the STM32 micro-processor. Next, an efficient distributed cooperative navigation estimation strategy is proposed, which involves two stages: (i) maximum posteriori based GNSS/UWB position estimation; (ii) Kalman filter based GNSS/UWB/INS position estimation. Finally, simulations of flight experiment are carried out to assess the efficiency and performance of the designed cooperative navigation system. The simulation results indicate our navigation system improves the position accuracy of each QAV significantly.