Cooperative Positioning Based on UWB and MDS

In GNSS-denied environments, swarm drones struggle to obtain accurate location information, thus limiting their applications. Cooperative positioning involves utilizing wireless ranging among drones to determine their relative positions. This article assumes each drone is equipped with ultra-wideband (UWB) nodes, and the swarm drones generates a distance-squared matrix through bidirectional ranging. Then, the multidimensional scaling (MDS) algorithm is employed to compute the relative coordinates of the swarm drones using the generated distance-squared matrix. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of cooperative positioning in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional scenarios and provide insights into the positioning errors under various ranging noise influences. The simulation results validate the feasibility of this UWB and MDS-based cooperative positioning approach.