Design and SITL Performance of an online Distributed Target Estimation for UAV Swarm

In this paper, an online distributed target estimation for a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in formation flight is considered. In particular, a flocking algorithm is employed to handle the formation task, while a Distributed Kalman Filter in the Information form is used to perform the estimate of a mobile target state. Software-In-The-Loop simulations are carried on in the ROS/Gazebo environment to illustrate the coupling between the formation and the estimation tasks. Moreover, the influence of swarm connectivity in the estimation process is analyzed, showing the benefits of information fusion.