Self-Organized UWB Localization for Robotic Swarm – First Results from an Analogue Mission on Volcano Etna

Abstract

At the Institute of Communications and Navigation of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), we have studied and developed radio-based swarm navigation technologies for a decade. In this paper, we provide a complete solution of ultra-wide band (UWB) localization network for a robotic swarm. This network is organized in a fully decentralized fashion and resilient to clock imperfections, topology changes, packet loss and the hidden node problem. In this network, a multitude of active devices and an arbitrary number of passive devices can exploit the UWB signals for self-localization, i.e. estimating their relative positions and orientations, without sophisticated clock and antenna calibration, which dramatically simplifies the design and manufacturing of such a swarm. Our proposed solution is verified with experiments and was successfully demonstrated in a space-analogue multi-robot surface exploration mission on the volcano Mt. Etna, Sicily, Italy, in July 2022.