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.
Reference:
Jiri Horyna, Vit Kratky, Vaclav Pritzl, Tomas Baca, Eliseo Ferrante and Martin Saska. Fast Swarming of UAVs in GNSS-denied Feature-Poor Environments without Explicit Communication. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 9(6):5284-5291, April 2024.
Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2404.18729
An MRS open-source research UAV platform was used for experiments presented in this video. See mrs.felk.cvut.cz/system for details and the source code of the MRS UAV platform, which enables all essential capabilities for research, development, and testing of novel methods. For publications describing the applied system and control stack, see:
- Tomas Baca, Matej Petrlik, Matous Vrba, Vojtech Spurny, Robert Penicka, Daniel Hert and Martin Saska, “The MRS UAV System: Pushing the Frontiers of Reproducible Research, Real-world Deployment, and Education with Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems 102(26):1-28, May 2021.
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10846-021-01383-5
- D. Hert et al., "MRS Modular UAV Hardware Platforms for Supporting Research in Real-World Outdoor and Indoor Environments," 2022 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), 2022, pp. 1264-1273, doi: 10.1109/ICUAS54217.2022.983608 (ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9836083)
This work was accomplished by the MRS group at CTU in Prague mrs.felk.cvut.cz . For more experiments with the MRS UAV research platforms, see mrs.felk.cvut.cz/publications
For mutual navigation of robots in the group, a smart UVDAR sensor developed by the MRS group at CTU in Prague mrs.felk.cvut.cz was used. For details, see:
- V Walter, N Staub, A Franchi and M Saska, “UVDAR System for Visual Relative Localization With Application to Leader-Follower Formations of Multirotor UAVs,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 4(3):2637-2644, July 2019.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8651535
- V Walter, N.Staub, M Saska and A Franchi, “Mutual Localization of UAVs based on Blinking Ultraviolet Markers and 3D Time-Position Hough Transform,” In 14th IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE 2018). 2018.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8560384
- V Walter, M Saska and A Franchi, “Fast mutual relative localization of uavs using ultraviolet led markers,” In 2018 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft System (ICUAS 2018). 2018.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8453331