Stable Multi-Drone GNSS Tracking System for Marine Robots

2025-11-23

AI Summary

Marine robots operating at or near the water surface often suffer from unreliable or unavailable GNSS signals, while conventional navigation methods—such as inertial navigation, Doppler velocity log (DVL), SLAM, and acoustic positioning—suffer from error accumulation, high computational overhead, or infrastructure dependency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a scalable multi-UAV cooperative GNSS tracking system. Its core contributions are: (1) a cross-UAV tracking ID alignment algorithm ensuring global consistency across multi-view observations; and (2) a confidence-weighted extended Kalman filter framework that fuses lightweight visual detection, multi-object tracking, and GNSS triangulation for low-latency, robust real-time position estimation. Experimental results demonstrate the system’s strong scalability and interference resilience under complex maritime conditions, effectively suppressing cumulative errors and achieving sub-meter positioning accuracy.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: State Estimation
• Computer Vision: Motion & Tracking
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Security and Privacy: Tracking, profiling, and countermeasures against them

Abstract

Accurate localization is essential for marine robotics, yet Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals are unreliable or unavailable even at a very short distance below the water surface. Traditional alternatives, such as inertial navigation, Doppler Velocity Loggers (DVL), SLAM, and acoustic methods, suffer from error accumulation, high computational demands, or infrastructure dependence. In this work, we present a scalable multi-drone GNSS-based tracking system for surface and near-surface marine robots. Our approach combines efficient visual detection, lightweight multi-object tracking, GNSS-based triangulation, and a confidence-weighted Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to provide stable GNSS estimation in real time. We further introduce a cross-drone tracking ID alignment algorithm that enforces global consistency across views, enabling robust multi-robot tracking with redundant aerial coverage. We validate our system in diversified complex settings to show the scalability and robustness of the proposed algorithm.

Problem

• Providing stable GNSS localization for surface marine robots
• Overcoming signal unreliability below water surface with drones
• Replacing error-prone traditional marine navigation alternatives

Innovation

• Multi-drone GNSS triangulation for marine robot tracking
• Confidence-weighted EKF enables stable real-time estimation
• Cross-drone ID alignment ensures global tracking consistency