Real-time Relative Pose Estimation for Muti-UAV Systems Using Odometry and UWB Measurements

This article studies the problem of real-time relative pose estimation of multi-UAV systems based on inter-UAV distance measurement and onboard odometry. In large-scale UAV systems, the centralized localization problem using only distance measurements is challenging from the perspective of computational burden. The concerned relative pose estimation problem is formulated as a squared distance weighted least squares problem and is then decomposed to be executed on each UAV. Constraints on the relative poses of neighboring UAVs with mutual distance measurements are added to the problem under the condition that some UAVs lack direct distance measurements, subsequently transforming it into a Quadratically Constrained Quadratic Programming (QCQP) form for solving. Simulation experiments show that the proposed optimization problem is effective in real-time relative pose estimation of large-scale UAVs with distance measurements and odometry, and can yield more accurate pose estimates than the relevant literature.