Three-dimensional relative localization and synchronized movement with wireless ranging

Relative localization is a key capability for autonomous robot swarms, and it is a substantial challenge, especially for small flying robots, as they are extremely restricted in terms of sensors and processing while other robots may be located anywhere around them in three-dimensional space. In this article, we generalize wireless ranging...

A Computationally Efficient Moving Horizon Estimator for Ultra-Wideband Localization on Small Quadrotors

We present a computationally efficient moving horizon estimator that allows for real-time localization using Ultra-Wideband measurements on small quadrotors. The estimator uses only a single iteration of a simple gradient descent method to optimize the state estimate based on past measurements, while using random sample consensus to reject...

Visual model-predictive localization for computationally efficient autonomous racing of a 72-g drone

Drone racing is becoming a popular e-sport all over the world, and beating the best human drone race pilots has quickly become a new major challenge for artificial intelligence and robotics. In this paper, we propose a novel sensor fusion method called visual model-predictive localization (VML). Within a small time window, VML approximates...

Unsupervised Tuning of Filter Parameters Without Ground-Truth Applied to Aerial Robots

Autonomous robots heavily rely on well-tuned state estimation filters for successful control. This letter presents a novel automatic tuning strategy for learning filter parameters by minimizing the innovation, i.e., the discrepancy between expected and received signals from all sensors. The optimization process only requires the inputs and...

On-board range-based relative localization for micro air vehicles in indoor leader–follower flight

We present a range-based solution for indoor relative localization by micro air vehicles (MAVs), achieving sufficient accuracy for leader–follower flight. Moving forward from previous work, we removed the dependency on a common heading measurement by the MAVs, making the relative localization accuracy independent of magnetometer readings. We...

The PageRank algorithm as a method to optimize swarm behavior through local analysis

This work proposes PageRank as a tool to evaluate and optimize the global performance of a swarm based on the analysis of the local behavior of a single robot. PageRank is a graph centrality measure that assesses the importance of nodes based on how likely they are to be reached when traversing a graph. We relate this, using a microscopic...

On-board communication-based relative localization for collision avoidance in Micro Air Vehicle teams

To avoid collisions, Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) flying in teams require estimates of their relative locations, preferably with minimal mass and processing burden. We present a relative localization method where MAVs need only to communicate with each other using their wireless transceiver. The MAVs exchange on-board states (velocity, height,...