Multi-UAV Cooperative Positioning Based on Delaunay Triangulation

A method of multi-UAV positioning based on Delaunay triangulation is proposed in this paper. Considering that the durable UAV's navigation cannot hold a good accuracy in long distance when GPS signal is denied, the UAV's location can be calculated using the relative range from the other teams. Similar to the principle of GPS, the method takes three other UAVs as the reference points for an UAV whose GPS receiver works improperly due to failure. Because there are more reference points available in the Multi-UAV flight, the choosing method is based on the Delaunay diagram theory. Thus the UAV's location in 2D can be determined by using the relative ranges from the faulty UAV to the other three UAVs at known location in inertial coordinate system. In order to improve the accuracy of estimated location, a Kalman filter is designed, which can calculate the variance of observations in terms of horizontal dilution of positioning (HDOP) adaptively. Simulation results in Matlab/Simulink show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.