15 accepted papers
This paper presents a framework for the real-time initialization of unknown Ultra-Wideband (UWB) anchors in UWB-aided navigation systems. The method is designed for localization solutions where UWB modules act as supplementary sensors. Our approach enables the automatic detection and calibration of
In this paper, we present the Swarming Without an Anchor (SWA) approach to state estimation in swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) experiencing ego-localization dropout, where individual agents are laterally stabilized using relative information only. We propose to fuse decentralized state est
This paper introduces a generic filter-based state estimation framework that supports two state-decoupling strategies based on cross-covariance factorization. These strategies reduce the computational complexity and inherently support true modularity – a perquisite for handling and processing meshed…
In this paper, we present a Radar-Inertial Odometry (RIO) approach that utilizes performance improving modules, enhanced for the sparse and noisy radar signals, from the vision community in order to estimate the full 6DoF pose and 3D velocity of a robot in an unprepared environment. Our method lever…
While low-level auto pilot stacks for aerial vehicles focus on robust control, sensing, and estimation, the continuous advancement of higher-level autonomy for aerial vehicles requires much more complex higher-level flight stacks in order to enable safe, fully autonomous long-duration missions. Rath
Collaboratively estimating the state of two robots under communication constraints is challenging regarding computational complexity and statistical optimality. Previous work only achieves practical solutions by either disregarding parts of the measurements or imposing a communication overhead, bein…
Navigating accurately in potentially GPS-denied environments is a perquisite of autonomous systems. Relative localization based on ultra-wideband (UWB) is - especially indoors - a promising technology. In this paper, we present a probabilistic filter based Modular Multi-Sensor Fusion (MMSF) approach…
Multicopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are small and agile robots with the potential to become prominent in performing autonomous tasks in various Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments. These environments can potentially be rendered even more challenging due to external f…
Small drones that navigate using cameras may be limited in their speed and agility by low onboard computing power. We evaluate the role of edge computing in 5G for such autonomous navigation. The offloading of image processing tasks to an edge server is studied with a vision-based navigation algorit
State-of-the-art recursive sensor filtering frameworks allow the fusion of multiple sensors tailored to a specific problem but do not allow a dynamic and efficient introduction of additional sensors during runtime - an important feature to enable long-term missions in dynamic environments. This lett
Fusing information from multiple sensors in aprobabilistic framework can significantly improve the estimation of the system's states, allow for redundancy, and for adaptations in dynamic environments. However, the computation complexity increases with the number of sensors and the dimension of the e
This paper presents a novel approach to recover outdated cross-covariance between correlated agents at the moment they perform joint observations. This allows to render Collaborative State Estimation (CSE) fully distributed, with communication only required for the moment of joint observation and mo…
The research community presented significant advances in many different Visual-Inertial Navigation System (VINS) algorithms to localize mobile robots or hand-held devices in a 3D environment. While authors of the algorithms of-ten do compare to, at that time, existing competing approaches, their com…
In this paper, we present a Quaternion-based Error-State Extended Kalman Filter (Q-ESEKF) based on IMU propagation with an extension for Collaborative State Estimation (CSE) and a communication complexity of O(1) (in terms of required communication links). Our approach combines a versatile filter fo…
Delay compensation in filter based sensor fusion frameworks for multiple sensors with varying delays and different rates quickly results in large computational overhead should the delayed measurements be incorporated in a statistically meaningful way. Even more so if high rate propagation sensors (e…