On-board Range-based Relative Localization for Micro Aerial Vehicles in indoor Leader-Follower Flight
This addresses the problem of enabling autonomous leader-follower flight for MAVs in GPS-denied indoor environments, representing an incremental improvement by removing magnetometer dependency.
The paper tackled indoor relative localization for Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) in leader-follower flight by developing a range-based solution that removes dependency on common heading measurements, achieving sufficient accuracy for autonomous close-proximity flight in real-world indoor tests.
We present a range-based solution for indoor relative localization by Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs), achieving sufficient accuracy for leader-follower flight. Moving forward from previous work, we removed the dependency on a common heading measurement by the MAVs, making the relative localization accuracy independent of magnetometer readings. We found that this restricts the relative maneuvers that guarantee observability, and also that higher accuracy range measurements are required to rectify the missing heading information, yet both disadvantages can be tackled. Our implementation uses Ultra Wide Band, for both range measurements between MAVs and sharing their velocities, accelerations, yaw rates, and height with each other. We used this on real MAVs and performed leader-follower flight in an indoor environment. The follower MAVs could follow the leader MAV in close proximity for the entire durations of the flights. The followers were autonomous and used only on-board sensors to track and follow the leader.