Localization of UGV Guided by UAV Using Visual Inertia Sensors and UWB

Air-ground Collaborative SLAM (CoSLAM) is particularly suitable for route planning and mapping in large scenes. However, accurate localization of an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) in CoSLAM has been a challenging task, making route planning for various applications not always reliable. In this study, we design a air-ground collaborative system, which applies Ultra Wide Band (UWB) ranging units on both Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and UGV as additional sensors to collect range information between the UAV and the UGV. The range information is used to correct the position of the UGV provided by the UAV. The correction is realized through an extended Kalman filter. Simulation results verify the proposed method.