Relative Navigation for Vehicle Formation Movement

Today a cooperation operation of vehicles has many applications in different types sectors of the economy. The rapid development of wireless digital data transferring equipment makes possible accurate measuring of length of the communication data link. Cooperative operation of vehicles is supported by advanced wireless data transferring technologies that can include range measuring between transmitter and receivers. In this case, ranges between different vehicles can be measured. Available ranges in the system can be used as input data for relative navigation for vehicle formation movement. In the paper we study perils for the application of relative navigation in the horizontal plane and 3D space. Also, regions of the required amount of input data for navigation equations solution have been estimated. An example of road traffic has been used to estimate exact vehicles locations. In numerical application, 15 ranges between six vehicles are used to estimate vehicles coordinates in the horizontal plane. The solution has been obtained in a local reference frame which is rotated around the reference vehicle at a particular angle. Obtained results indicate the practical application of relative navigation methods in a modern digital communication network for vehicle formation movement.