Drone Positioning System Using UWB Sensing and Out-of-Band Control

Research on drones becomes vigorous not only for single drone but also drone fleet, which operates multiple drones in a formation. To widen the applicability of drone fleet, high positioning accuracy and low latency are required. Most drone products or research use the Global Positioning System (GPS) for positioning, but the accuracy is insufficient for performing various drone missions in dense or indoor environments. In this paper, we present a novel Ultra-wideband (UWB) positioning system that uses an out-of-band network for control channel. Each UWB module serves as a remote sensor for detecting and positioning multiple drones. Unlike traditional anchor-tag based UWB ranging, all nodes in the proposed system have no distinction between the roles of anchor and tag by utilizing enhanced multidimensional scaling (MDS). We practically implemented our proposed system and evaluated the system with numerical experiments. Through the numerical analysis, we have found that the proposed system provides enough accuracy and low latency to be applied to the drone fleet.