Design, Implementation and Validation of a Multipurpose Localization Service for Cooperative Multi-UAV Systems

Systems composed of groups of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as an extension of the usage of single UAVs in a number of applications. Besides of very desirable, the possibility of using multi-UAV systems requires that each UAV in the group has information about the locations of the others, so that the system as a whole can work smoothly, i.e. keeping configured flight formation, without collisions, evenly distributing the tasks, and even authenticating one another so that no malicious node access the group. To support such multi-UAV systems setup, this work reports the proposal of a multipurpose localization service to disseminate positioning information of the UAVs to the group as well as to estimate the positions that are not received due to communication errors. The proposal consists in a complete methodology to setup, test and perform multi-UAV missions, which are firstly planned, setup and tested in a simulated environment, and then performed in the real-world. Design and implementation details of the proposed infrastructure service are presented, along with a complete validation of the proposal, from simulation to the field experiments. The acquired results provide evidence that the proposed service and methodology are efficient to support fleet of UAVs performing cooperative missions.