An Investigation of Purely Azimuthal Passive Localization and Position Adjustment in Attempted UAV Formation Flights

When a cluster of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is flying in formation, it is crucial to maintain the formation and not to be interfered by external electromagnetic wave signals. In order to maintain the formation, this paper proposes to use pure azimuth passive positioning to adjust the position of UAVs, i.e., certain UAVs in the formation transmit signals, the rest of the UAVs receive the signals passively, and extract the orientation information from them to adjust the position of the UAVs [1] [2] [3]. In this paper, the position adjustment problem of UAVs in “circular” formation flight under three models is investigated. To address the problem of “how to obtain the position of the receiving UAV when there are two UAVs with known numbers and evenly distributed on the circumference in addition to the UAV transmitting at the known center of the circle, and the rest of the UAVs with slight deviations in their positions are receiving the signals”, two purely mathematical geometric methods, namely, triangular localization method and polar co-ordinate method, are proposed respectively. We have determined the position of the receiving UAV;we have used the exhaustive method and the construction and disproof method to solve the problem of “how many UAVs are needed to transmit signals in order to realize the effective positioning of the UAVs when it is known that a certain UAV with a slight deviation in its position receives the signals emitted by two UAVs at the same time”, and the results show that: in addition to the known signals emitted by two UAVs, it is also necessary to transmit the signals emitted by two UAVs. The results show that in addition to the known two UAVs transmitting signals, two additional UAVs are required to transmit signals for precise po-sitioning. When the position of UAVs has deviation at the initial moment, the ideal approximation method and the target delimitation method are pro-posed, and the target of nine UAVs uniformly distributed on a circle of a spe-cific radius is achieved through several adjustments, after which the ad-vantages and disadvantages of each model are analyzed, and suggestions for improvement are put forward. The purely azimuthal passive localization method and the constructed model approach proposed in this paper can be extended to other fields, such as spacecraft formations in space and battle-ship formations at sea, as well as other formation flight position adjustment problems.

A cluster positioning architecture and relative positioning algorithm based on pigeon fock bionics

Unmanned clusters can realize collaborative work,fexible confguration,and efcient operation,which has become an important development trend of unmanned platforms.Cluster positioning is important for ensuring the normal operation of unmanned clusters.The existing solutions have some problems such as requiring external system assistance,high system complexity,poor architecture scalability,and accumulation of positioning errors over time.Without the aid of the information outside the cluster,we plan to construct the relative position relationship with north alignment to adopt formation control and achieve robust cluster relative positioning.Based on the idea of bionics,this paper proposes a cluster robust hierarchical positioning architecture by analyzing the autonomous behavior of pigeon focks.We divide the clusters into follower clusters,core clusters,and leader nodes,which can realize fexible networking and cluster expansion.Aiming at the core cluster that is the most critical to relative positioning in the architecture,we propose a cluster relative positioning algorithm based on spatiotemporal correlation information.With the design idea of low cost and large-scale application,the algorithm uses intra-cluster ranging and the inertial navigation motion vector to construct the positioning equation and solves it through the Multidimensional Scaling(MDS)and Multiple Objective Particle Swarm Optimization(MOPSO)algorithms.The cluster formation is abstracted as a mixed direction-distance graph and the graph rigidity theory is used to analyze localizability conditions of the algorithm.We designed the cluster positioning simulation software and conducted localizability tests and positioning accuracy tests in diferent scenarios.Compared with the relative positioning algorithm based on Extended Kalman Filter(EKF),the algorithm proposed in this paper has more relaxed positioning conditions and can adapt to a variety of scenarios.It also has higher relative positioning accuracy,and the error does not accumulate over time.