Fast Swarming of UAVs in GNSS-denied Feature-poor Environments without Explicit Communication

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Horyna, Jiri, Kratky, Vit, Pritzl, Vaclav, Baca, Tomas, Ferrante, Eliseo, Saska, Martin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Horyna, Jiri
Kratky, Vit
Pritzl, Vaclav
Baca, Tomas
Ferrante, Eliseo
Saska, Martin
author_facet Horyna, Jiri
Kratky, Vit
Pritzl, Vaclav
Baca, Tomas
Ferrante, Eliseo
Saska, Martin
contents A decentralized swarm approach for the fast cooperative flight of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in feature-poor environments without any external localization and communication is introduced in this paper. A novel model of a UAV neighborhood is proposed to achieve robust onboard mutual perception and flocking state feedback control, which is designed to decrease the inter-agent oscillations common in standard reactive swarm models employed in fast collective motion. The novel swarming methodology is supplemented with an enhanced Multi-Robot State Estimation (MRSE) strategy to increase the reliability of the purely onboard localization, which may be unreliable in real environments. Although MRSE and the neighborhood model may rely on information exchange between agents, we introduce a communication-less version of the swarming framework based on estimating communicated states to decrease dependence on the often unreliable communication networks of large swarms. The proposed solution has been verified by a set of complex real-world experiments to demonstrate its overall capability in different conditions, including a UAV interception-motivated task with a group velocity reaching the physical limits of the individual hardware platforms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_18729
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fast Swarming of UAVs in GNSS-denied Feature-poor Environments without Explicit Communication
Horyna, Jiri
Kratky, Vit
Pritzl, Vaclav
Baca, Tomas
Ferrante, Eliseo
Saska, Martin
Robotics
A decentralized swarm approach for the fast cooperative flight of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in feature-poor environments without any external localization and communication is introduced in this paper. A novel model of a UAV neighborhood is proposed to achieve robust onboard mutual perception and flocking state feedback control, which is designed to decrease the inter-agent oscillations common in standard reactive swarm models employed in fast collective motion. The novel swarming methodology is supplemented with an enhanced Multi-Robot State Estimation (MRSE) strategy to increase the reliability of the purely onboard localization, which may be unreliable in real environments. Although MRSE and the neighborhood model may rely on information exchange between agents, we introduce a communication-less version of the swarming framework based on estimating communicated states to decrease dependence on the often unreliable communication networks of large swarms. The proposed solution has been verified by a set of complex real-world experiments to demonstrate its overall capability in different conditions, including a UAV interception-motivated task with a group velocity reaching the physical limits of the individual hardware platforms.
title Fast Swarming of UAVs in GNSS-denied Feature-poor Environments without Explicit Communication
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.18729