During the seminar, we will present our work on UAV swarming in GNSS-denied
feature-poor environments.

Reference:
Jiri Horyna, Vit Kratky, Vaclav Pritzl, Tomas Baca, Eliseo Ferrante and Martin
Saska. Fast Swarming of UAVs in GNSS-denied Feature-Poor Environments without
Explicit Communication. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 9(6):5284-5291,
April 2024.

Paper Abstract:
A decentralized swarm approach for the fast cooperative flight of Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in feature-poor environments without any external
localization and communication is introduced in this letter. A novel model of a
UAV neighborhood is proposed to achieve robust onboard mutual perception and
flocking state feedback control, which is designed to decrease the inter-agent
oscillations common in standard reactive swarm models employed in fast
collective motion. The novel swarming methodology is supplemented with an
enhanced Multi-Robot State Estimation (MRSE) strategy to increase the
reliability of the purely onboard localization, which may be unreliable in real
environments. Although MRSE and the neighborhood model may rely on information
exchange between agents, we introduce a communication-less version of the
swarming framework based on estimating communicated states to decrease
dependence on the often unreliable communication networks of large swarms. The
proposed solution has been verified by a set of complex real-world experiments
to demonstrate its overall capability in different conditions, including a UAV
interception-motivated task with a group velocity reaching the physical limits
of the individual hardware platforms.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2024.3390596

The seminar will be of a short length (20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion).