A Visual/Inertial Relative Navigation Method for UAV Formation

Nowadays, the task of determining positions for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has been mainly handled by combining Inertial Navigation System (INS) with Global Positioning System (GPS). This paper presents a visual/inertial relative navigation method for UAV formation to overcome the disadvantages of GPS such as disturbed easily. Firstly, INS and visual navigation system are respectively studied. Secondly, the state and observation equations of the visual/inertial navigation system are established. And Muti-rate Kalman Filter (MKF) is designed to estimate the position errors. Finally, the performance of this method is analyzed via a simulation.