UAV clusters information geometry fusion positioning method with LEO satellite system

The existing Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) positioning performance cannot meet the requirements of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) clusters for high-precision real-time positioning in the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) denial conditions. Therefore, this paper proposes a UAV Clusters Information Geometry Fusion Positioning (UC-IGFP) method using pseudo-ranges from the LEO satellites. A novel graph model for linking and computing between the UAV clusters and LEO satellites was established. By utilizing probability to describe the positional states of UAVs and sensor errors, the distributed multivariate Probability Fusion Cooperative Positioning (PF-CP) algorithm is proposed to achieve high-precision cooperative positioning and integration of the cluster. Criteria to select the centroid of the cluster were set. A new Kalman filter algorithm that is suitable for UAV clusters was designed based on the global benchmark and Riemann information geometry theory, which overcomes the discontinuity problem caused by the change of cluster centroids. Finally, the UC-IGFP method achieves the LEO continuous high-precision positioning of UAV clusters. The proposed method effectively addresses the positioning challenges caused by the strong direction of signal beams from LEO satellites and the insufficient constraint quantity of information sources at the edge nodes of the cluster. It significantly improves the accuracy and reliability of LEO-UAV cluster positioning. The results of comprehensive simulation experiments show that the proposed method has a 30.5% improvement in performance over the mainstream positioning methods, with a positioning error of 14.267 m.