Resilient Range-Only Cooperative Positioning of Multiple Smart Unmanned Aerial Systems

Deploying multiple Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) is beneficial for applications that survey large regions and require cooperative redundancy. Range-only cooperative navigation has been proposed to enhance positioning precision by exchanging navigation information, especially in Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)-denied environments. However, existing works do not consider the possible attacks on range-only positioning in exceptionally adverse environments and do not investigate the resilience of cooperative navigation. In this paper, we consider the attacks on range measurements in the context of distributed range-only positioning using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) and present an anti-attack approach by integrating the Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) with the distributed position estimator. Moreover, this paper evaluates the resilience of the cooperative navigation system under Gaussian and non-Gausisian attacks. Extensive simulations on a cooperative task for multiple UASs to survey a target area demonstrate that the range-only positioning by EKF is vulnerable to non-Gaussian attacks and that the proposed anti-attack approach can detect the attacks with a high probability and mitigate the performance degradation caused by attacks.