Kalman filter based team navigation for Multiple Unmanned Marine Vehicles

In applications employing multiple unmanned marine vehicles (MUMVs), the navigation has a very great importance to guarantee formation preservation and collision avoidance. While single vehicles usually base their navigation on absolute measurements (GPS, inertial navigation) to determine their position relative to the world, it may be reasonable to perform a relative navigation within vehicle teams. In this paper, we propose relative team navigation based on Kalman Filters to enable a velocity controller to establish a close formation under the typical marine constraints (narrow band width communication with low reliability). We will simulate a team of three marine vehicles and compare the results of different strategies for team navigation.