Tight Fusion of Odometry and Kinematic Constraints for Multiple Aerial Vehicles in Physical Interconnection

Integrated aerial Platforms (IAPs), comprising multiple aircrafts, are typically fully actuated and hold signif- icant potential for aerial manipulation tasks. Differing from a multiple aerial swarm, the aircrafts within the IAP are intercon- nected, presenting promising opportunities for enhancing local- ization. Incorporating the physical constraints of these multiple aircrafts to improve the accuracy and reliability of integrated aircraft positioning and navigation systems is a challenging yet highly significant problem. In this paper, we introduce a distributed multi-aircraft visual-inertial-range odometry system that analyzes the position, velocity, and attitude constraints within the IAP. Leveraging constraint relationships in the IAP, we propose corresponding methods that tightly fuse visual- inertial-range odometry and kinematic constraints to optimize odometry accuracy. Our system’s performance is validated using a collected dataset, resulting in a notable 28.7% reduction in drift compared to the baseline.