Cooperative navigation of MAVs In GPS denied areas

Cooperative missions for Miniature Air Vehicles (MAVs) require accurate position, velocity, and attitude estimates for all MAVs within the group for its successful completion. This paper details a cooperative methodology for MAV navigation in times of Global Positioning System (GPS) outages or in GPS denied areas. In this method, each MAV estimates position, attitude, and velocity of all MAVs in its sensor range, including itself. Each MAV collects the IMU measurements from each of the neighboring MAVs and fuses these measurements with relative range and bearing measurements taken of every MAV in its sensor range. This collected data is then used to estimate navigation states using an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Simulation results presented in this paper demonstrate that this Cooperative Navigation System (CNS) can effectively constrain pose estimation drift in the absence of GPS. We also performed the nonlinear observability analysis to support the improved performance of CNS.