UWB-based Multiple UAV Control System for Indoor Ground Vehicle Tracking

Abstract

We present an Ultra-Wide Band (UWB)-based multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) control system architecture to localize and track a ground vehicle. A team of UAVs self-localizes its position and measures distance to a ground vehicle using the mounted UWB module. The server utilizes the estimated position of UAV and distance measurements collected from radio communication between ground vehicle and UAVs (i.e., mobile anchor) in order to localize the ground vehicle accurately. The server then sends next setpoint to each UAVs and enables UAVs to form a polygon-shaped formation with a ground vehicle located at the center. We demonstrate our proposed system through the indoor ground vehicle tracking experiment. Our experiment results show that localization error with the mobile anchors is less than 0.2m; in addition, the fixed anchors can be replaced with the mobile anchors.