Navigation of unmanned vehicles using a swarm of intelligent dynamic landmarks

The work presented here describes a novel 3D navigation method for teams of unmanned vehicles using intelligent dynamic landmarks (IDLs). The technique allows robots to navigate in diverse structured and unstructured environments both indoor and outdoor avoiding typical disadvantages of traditional navigational techniques. Some robots comprising the team are considered as IDLs while others use such landmarks to accomplish their task. The proposed approach does not require any type of traditional external landmarks or any kind of environmental model. Instead, robots continuously perform direct measurements of their relative position with respect to neighboring robots with which they interchange relative position information to verify relative and global localization. Robots process the obtained information to generate ego-centric estimates of the relative position of other robots using an origami graph. The proposed technique allows the team's configurations to change according to the task to be performed and allows effective navigation even under robots' mechanical and/or sensor failures.