Ultra-Wideband Swarm Ranging

Nowadays, aerial and ground robots, wearable and portable devices are becoming smaller, lighter, cheaper, and thus popular. It is now possible to utilize tens and thousands of them to form a swarm to complete complicated cooperative tasks, such as searching, rescuing, mapping, and battling. A swarm usually contains a large number of robots or devices, which are in short distance to each other and may move dynamically. So this paper studies the dynamic and dense swarms. The ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is proposed to serve as the fundamental technique for both networking and localization, because UWB is so time sensitive that an accurate distance can be calculated using timestamps of the transmit and receive data packets. A UWB swarm ranging protocol is designed in this paper, with key features: simple yet efficient, adaptive and robust, scalable and supportive. This swarm ranging protocol is introduced part by part to uncover its support for each of these features. It is implemented on Crazyflie 2.1 drones, STM32 microcontrollers powered aerial robots, with onboard UWB wireless transceiver chips DW1000. Extensive real world experiments are conducted to verify the proposed protocol with a total of 9 Crazyflie drones in a compact area.