Hierarchical Collaborative Navigation Method for UAV Swarm
Publication: Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 34, Issue 1
Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm technology can expand the working scope of tasks and improve the overall task efficiency. Traditional single leader-follower fusion algorithms for cooperative navigation cannot fully utilize collaborative navigation information, and low reliability and navigation precision in interference cases. Meanwhile, the full connected fusion algorithm for cooperative navigation shows a large relative computing and communication burden and inflexibility to overcome the faults. Therefore, this paper proposes a collaborative navigation algorithm for a UAV swarm based on a hierarchical structure. A model for intervehicle collaborative measurement of UAV swarm cooperative navigation, with the line-of-sight calculation uncertainty estimation, is established. The hierarchical collaborative navigation fusion algorithm that could be adaptive to asynchronous updating of members in the swarm is designed. A comparison of simulation results of cooperative navigation of the UAV swarm by the different cooperative fusion algorithms is provided. The results indicate that the proposed method can improve the positioning accuracy and robustness of the cooperative navigation of a UAV swarm.
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Data Availability Statements
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the published article.
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61703208, 61873125, 61673208, 61533008, and 61533009), the Foundation Research Project of Jiangsu Province (Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, Grant Nos. BK20170815, BK20170767, and BK20181291), the Aeronautic Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 20165552043 and 20165852052), the Science and Technology Innovation Project for Selected Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars in Nanjing, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant Nos. NZ2019007, NS2017016, NP2018108, NJ20170005, and NP2017209), the Advanced Research Project of the Equipment Development (30102080101), the “333 Project” in Jiangsu Province (Grant No. BRA2016405), the Scientific Research Foundation for the Selected Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars (Grant No. 2016), the Foundation of Key Laboratory of Navigation, Guidance and Health-Management Technologies of Advanced Aerocraft (Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics), Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Jiangsu Key Laboratory “Internet of Things and Control Technologies,” and the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and valuable remarks.
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Published In
Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 34 • Issue 1 • January 2021
Copyright
© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Feb 19, 2020
Accepted: Aug 5, 2020
Published online: Sep 30, 2020
Published in print: Jan 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Feb 28, 2021
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