UGV-to-UAV cooperative ranging for robust navigation in GNSS-challenged environments

This paper considers cooperative navigation between an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) operating in a GNSS-challenged environment with an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV), and focuses on the design of the optimal motion of the UGV to best aide the UAV's navigation solution. Our approach reduces the uncertainty of a UAV's navigation solution through the use of peer-to-peer radio ranging from a cooperative UGV, whose location is designed to improve positioning geometry for the UAV. Two novel cooperative strategies and two different estimation strategies for the UGV to assist a UAV are developed and compared. Through the use of a realistic simulation environment, it is shown that employing UGV-to-UAV cooperative navigation can reduce the positioning error of a UAV that is operating in a GNSS-challenged environment, from approximately 1-meter-level to approximately 10-cm-level 3D positioning error.