Multiple Vehicle Cooperative Vision-Aided Navigation

The development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) began soon after the ?rst manned ?ight. The evolution of unmanned systems has lead to a shift from manned to unmanned Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance missions which has in-turn lead to an increase in the number of Unmanned Vehicles (UV) operating in a theater. The development of UV technologies has removed the pilot and crew from the vehicle to safe locations. As a result the scale of these vehicles may be reduced considerably, and this reduction in scale allows for increased operation of UVs in Global Positioning System (GPS) degraded environments. With the loss of GPS signal the vehicles are forced to rely on Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) which, when reduced to an appropriate size for these applications, are inherently inaccurate. (more…)