i-TEAMS: Cooperative GNC for small UAV formations

The research project named "i-TEAMS" (innovative TEchniques for Autonomous Micro-UAV Swarms) aims at developing new architectures and technologies for distributed guidance, navigation, and control of mini and/or micro Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Main research topics and the project strategy are described. Then, the basic logical steps of innovative cooperative navigation algorithms, and measurement uncertainty budgets, are provided. Experimental results demonstrate effective vision-based tracking and promising performance in terms of attitude estimation based on differential GPS and relative sensing.