Cooperative Enhancement of Position Accuracy of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Nowadays, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become very popular for civil as well as military purposes, ranging from small quadcopters up to plane sized drones. UAVs are usually controlled manually or autonomously, both ways often heavily relying on the use of a global positioning system such as GPS. However, especially the wide spread GPS suffers form large positioning errors of 10-30 m on average. In this paper it is shown how UAVs can improve the accuracy of their position estimates by cooperating with each other. By using ranging hardware, UAVs can create a local positioning frame of reference, and use this to reduce the average positioning error of the global positions. This is done by finding an optimal 3D-rotation between the local and global coordinates. By using simulation, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, as well as the influence of parameters like vehicle speed and area size on the average positioning error.