Cooperative Geolocation with UAVs Under Communication Constraints
William W. Whitacre, Mark Campbell · AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference and Exhibit · 2007
Cooperative tracking of a ground target using camera measurements on SeaScan UAVs with periodic access to inter-vehicle communication is considered. The optimal solution to the communication limited estimation problem for systems with known measurement equations and statistics is derived and insight from this solution is used to develop two new methods. These methods attempt to approximate the information matrix updates to be communicated. The first method uses a piecewise constant approximation to the information matrix updates and the second method estimates the information matrix updates to be shared directly from estimates of the cooperating UAV states. These new methods are evaluated using flight test data and show tracking accuracy comparable to the full communication accuracy even with a drastic reduction in communication.