| Navigation of Swarm Quadcopters in GPS-Denied Environment |
| Paper ID : 1077-IUGRC6 |
| Authors |
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Sherif Seif El-Din Bahgat *1, Mina Nady Mofid2, Mohamed Kamal2, Omar Mohamed Hussien1 15th year, Computer and AI department, MTC. 25th year, Computer and AI Department, MTC. |
| Abstract |
| The integration of robotics into daily life applications is growing every day. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being extensively used for inspecting indoors, underground, surveying disaster sites, and tactical Search-and-Rescue missions. As these applications are mainly dependent on GPS signals, awareness increased of its two major shortcomings I) weak-to-no GPS signals at these locations, and II) ease at which the agents could be intentionally blocked from GPS access or communication signals at military or critical sites. Although this technology is still evolving, the movement toward developing algorithms that allow the operation of UAVs swarm is rising; to allow sharing of complicated tasks amongst the agents reducing the role of human operators. This paper discusses a reliable solution allowing a swarm of UAVs to traverse terrains in GPS-denied environments, using visual odometry to geo-localize. The proposed localization methodology is comprised of two stages: database preparation for the environment and onboard inference for real-time localization and navigation. The experimental results show that the proposed image-based localization succeeded to localize the quadcopter and share its position with other quadcopters in the swarm formation. Additionally, the proposed swarm formation able to control the leader and follower quadcopters to follow a predefined path with pre-set relative distance between the leader and follower. |
| Keywords |
| Swarm Robotics, Visual Odometry, Quadcopters, GPS-denied, Image-based Navigation |
| Status: Accepted |