Range-Based Localization for Swarms of Micro Air Vehicles

With their ability to access hard-to-reach spaces and to provide a birds-eye view over large areas,Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) are already taking over awide variety of monitoring and inspection tasks. As the continuing miniaturization of electronic components further drives down cost, recent advancements in the design of control algorithms promise a future, where these small drones will be able to operate fully autonomously and with minimal human input. Spatial awareness is a key aspect in developing fully autonomous MAVs and in this dissertation,we develop new algorithms for on-board localization usingUltra-Wideband (UWB) ranging. UWB is a low-power technology that enables data communication and time-of-flight range measurements. The large bandwidth of UWB results in high timing accuracy as well as an improved resistance to shadowing and multipathing, which makes UWB a very useful technology for ranging in indoor environments...