Autonomous Integrity Monitoring for Relative Navigation of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Yuan Sun

doi:10.3390/rs13081483

Abstract

Accurate and reliable relative navigation is the prerequisite to guarantee the effectiveness and safety of various multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) cooperation tasks, when absolute position information is unavailable or inaccurate. Among the UAV navigation techniques, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is widely used due to its worldwide coverage and simplicity in relative navigation. However, the observations of GNSS are vulnerable to different kinds of faults arising from transmission degradation, ionospheric scintillations, multipath, spoofing, and many other factors. In an effort to improve the reliability of multi-UAV relative navigation, an autonomous integrity monitoring method is proposed with a fusion of double differenced GNSS pseudoranges and Ultra Wide Band (UWB) ranging units. Specifically, the proposed method is designed to detect and exclude the fault observations effectively through a consistency check algorithm in the relative positioning system of the UAVs. Additionally, the protection level for multi-UAV relative navigation is estimated to evaluate whether the performance meets the formation flight and collision avoidance requirements. Simulated experiments derived from the real data are designed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in autonomous integrity monitoring for multi-UAV relative navigation.

Highlights

Nowadays, multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) cooperation is playing an important role in various civilian and military applications, such as remote sensing, packet delivery, flight show, and low altitude surveillance [1,2,3]
Two separate simulated experiments derived from the real flight data are designed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in autonomous integrity monitoring for multi-UAV relative navigation
To test the relative navigation performance of multi-UAV systems, the relative protection level (RPL) is estimated for relative position context

Summary

Introduction

Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) cooperation is playing an important role in various civilian and military applications, such as remote sensing, packet delivery, flight show, and low altitude surveillance [1,2,3]. For high-precision multi-UAV systems, one of the most important keys to guarantee the effectiveness and safety is an accurate and reliable “relative navigation”–the relative positions of a UAV with respect to the others. During multi-UAV remote sensing missions, the relative navigation solutions amongst the UAVs must be precisely known to synthesize a single large imaging aperture using all the measurements of the formation flying UAVs [4]. A stringent navigation performance on a relative position is required for each UAV to display different formations in order to obtain an impressive show effect and avoid collision accidents [5]. GNSS is the main source to measure the position due to its potential for high accuracy implementation, worldwide coverage and simplicity in relative navigation.

Objectives

Results

Conclusion