Vision-Aided Cooperative Navigation for Multiple Unmanned Vehicles

<p>The motivation of this research is to exploit three attributes of increased unmanned vehicle use for intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance missions. These attributes are: increased numbers of unmanned vehicles on-board vision and wireless communications. The research begins with the development of a cooperative navigation system based on the measurement of vehicle position relative to shared landmark position estimates. Each vehicle in the network locates landmarks using it's on-board vision system and transmits the data to all other system vehicles. After receiving data from the other vehicles the system fuses the landmarks with on-board measurements using a federated filter architecture. Simulations of the cooperative system with and without ranging are compared to a non-cooperative simulation. The comparison is performed using four platform motion scenarios: stationary linear angular and full motion. The simulation results demonstrate position error estimate improvements of 0.5cm to 1cm. Additionally; the stationary and linear motion scenarios demonstrate attitude observability difficulties eliminated by the introduction of angular motion.</p><p>This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore you will see the original copyright references library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world) and other notations in the work.</p><p>This work is in the public domain in the United States of America and possibly other nations. Within the United States you may freely copy and distribute this work as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.</p><p>As a reproduction of a historical artifact this work may contain missing or blurred pages poor pictures errant marks etc. Scholars believe and we concur that this work is important enough to be preserved reproduced and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.</p>