Relative Localization within a Quadcopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm Based on Airborne Monocular Vision

Swarming is one of the important trends in the development of small multi-rotor UAVs. The stable operation of UAV swarms and air-to-ground cooperative operations depend on precise relative position information within the swarm. Existing relative localization solutions mainly rely on passively received external information or expensive and complex sensors, which are not applicable to the application scenarios of small-rotor UAV swarms. Therefore, we develop a relative localization solution based on airborne monocular sensing data to directly realize real-time relative localization among UAVs. First, we apply the lightweight YOLOv8-pose target detection algorithm to realize the real-time detection of quadcopter UAVs and their rotor motors. Then, to improve the computational efficiency, we make full use of the geometric properties of UAVs to derive a more adaptable algorithm for solving the P3P problem. In order to solve the multi-solution problem when less than four motors are detected, we analytically propose a positive solution determination scheme based on reasonable attitude information. We also introduce the maximum weight of the motor-detection confidence into the calculation of relative localization position to further improve the accuracy. Finally, we conducted simulations and practical experiments on an experimental UAV. The experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme, in which the performance of the core algorithm is significantly improved over the classical algorithm. Our research provides viable solutions to free UAV swarms from external information dependence, apply them to complex environments, improve autonomous collaboration, and reduce costs.