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Ultra-Wideband Range-Only Localization for Flapping-Wing Micro Air Vehicles

A lightweight localization system that estimates a flapping-wing robot's 3D position from ultra-wideband distance measurements to fixed anchors, fused with an Extended Kalman Filter at a ground station. Students learn how identical 5-gram UWB devices serve as both tags and anchors, how a two-way-ranging protocol degrades gracefully when anchors are lost, and how range-only estimation meets the payload, computation, and energy constraints of micro air vehicles.

B9 Text

This paper has been accepted for publication at 40th Anniversary of the IEEE International

Small-scale flapping-wing aerial robots (ornithopters, FWMAVs) carry very little payload and little onboard compute, and their flapping strokes blur cameras, so conventional LiDAR, camera, and GNSS l…