Aerial Shepherds: Enabling Hierarchical Localization in Heterogeneous MAV Swarms

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Haoyang, Xu, Jingao, Zhao, Chenyu, Cheng, Yuhan, Chen, Xuecheng, Hong, Chaopeng, Zhang, Xiao-Ping, Liu, Yunhao, Chen, Xinlei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Haoyang
Xu, Jingao
Zhao, Chenyu
Cheng, Yuhan
Chen, Xuecheng
Hong, Chaopeng
Zhang, Xiao-Ping
Liu, Yunhao
Chen, Xinlei
author_facet Wang, Haoyang
Xu, Jingao
Zhao, Chenyu
Cheng, Yuhan
Chen, Xuecheng
Hong, Chaopeng
Zhang, Xiao-Ping
Liu, Yunhao
Chen, Xinlei
contents A heterogeneous micro aerial vehicles (MAV) swarm consists of resource-intensive but expensive advanced MAVs (AMAVs) and resource-limited but cost-effective basic MAVs (BMAVs), offering opportunities in diverse fields. Accurate and real-time localization is crucial for MAV swarms, but current practices lack a low-cost, high-precision, and real-time solution, especially for lightweight BMAVs. We find an opportunity to accomplish the task by transforming AMAVs into mobile localization infrastructures for BMAVs. However, translating this insight into a practical system is challenging due to issues in estimating locations with diverse and unknown localization errors of BMAVs, and allocating resources of AMAVs considering interconnected influential factors. This work introduces TransformLoc, a new framework that transforms AMAVs into mobile localization infrastructures, specifically designed for low-cost and resource-constrained BMAVs. We design an error-aware joint location estimation model to perform intermittent joint estimation for BMAVs and introduce a similarity-instructed adaptive grouping-scheduling strategy to allocate resources of AMAVs dynamically. TransformLoc achieves a collaborative, adaptive, and cost-effective localization system suitable for large-scale heterogeneous MAV swarms. We implement and validate TransformLoc on industrial drones. Results show it outperforms all baselines by up to 68\% in localization performance, improving navigation success rates by 60\%. Extensive robustness and ablation experiments further highlight the superiority of its design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_08408
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Aerial Shepherds: Enabling Hierarchical Localization in Heterogeneous MAV Swarms
Wang, Haoyang
Xu, Jingao
Zhao, Chenyu
Cheng, Yuhan
Chen, Xuecheng
Hong, Chaopeng
Zhang, Xiao-Ping
Liu, Yunhao
Chen, Xinlei
Networking and Internet Architecture
A heterogeneous micro aerial vehicles (MAV) swarm consists of resource-intensive but expensive advanced MAVs (AMAVs) and resource-limited but cost-effective basic MAVs (BMAVs), offering opportunities in diverse fields. Accurate and real-time localization is crucial for MAV swarms, but current practices lack a low-cost, high-precision, and real-time solution, especially for lightweight BMAVs. We find an opportunity to accomplish the task by transforming AMAVs into mobile localization infrastructures for BMAVs. However, translating this insight into a practical system is challenging due to issues in estimating locations with diverse and unknown localization errors of BMAVs, and allocating resources of AMAVs considering interconnected influential factors. This work introduces TransformLoc, a new framework that transforms AMAVs into mobile localization infrastructures, specifically designed for low-cost and resource-constrained BMAVs. We design an error-aware joint location estimation model to perform intermittent joint estimation for BMAVs and introduce a similarity-instructed adaptive grouping-scheduling strategy to allocate resources of AMAVs dynamically. TransformLoc achieves a collaborative, adaptive, and cost-effective localization system suitable for large-scale heterogeneous MAV swarms. We implement and validate TransformLoc on industrial drones. Results show it outperforms all baselines by up to 68\% in localization performance, improving navigation success rates by 60\%. Extensive robustness and ablation experiments further highlight the superiority of its design.
title Aerial Shepherds: Enabling Hierarchical Localization in Heterogeneous MAV Swarms
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08408