Information fusion distributed navigation for UAVs formation flight

High precision navigation is a key technique for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) formation flight. A methodology for fusing data from inertial navigation system (INS), global positioning system (GPS) and vision sensor is presented. For the lead UAV, a Kalman filter based INS/GPS integrated navigation system is designed. For the wing UAV, a local Kalman filter based INS/GPS integrated subsystem and local Kalman filter based INS/Vision/JTIDS subsystem are designed, and a distributed master filter based on information fusion estimation is designed to get the absolute navigation solution of wing UAV. And then, the relative navigation between the lead UAV and the wing UAV in formation can be obtained. Simulation results verify the validity of this formation navigation architecture for UAVs. Moreover, it illustrates that the distributed information fusion INS/GPS/Vision integrated navigation system for formation UAVs has highest geodetic navigation accuracy, when comparing with INS/GPS integrated navigation system and INS/Vision integrated navigation system.