Multi-UAV Cooperative Fault Detection Employing Vision-Based Relative Position Estimation

This paper presents a method to increase the reliability of UAV sensor fault detection in a multiUAV context. The method uses additional position estimations that augment individual UAV fault detection system. These additional estimations are obtained using images from the same planar scene taken from two different UAVs. Since accuracy and noise level of the estimation depends on several factors, dynamic replanning of the multiUAV team can be used to obtain a better estimation in case of faults caused by slow growing errors of absolute position estimation that cannot be detected by using local FDI in the UAVs. Experimental results with data from two real UAVs are also presented.