Quality Amplification of Error Prone Navigation for Swarms of Micro Aerial Vehicles (with Detailed Simulations)

We present an error tolerant path planning algorithm for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) swarms. We assume a MAV navigation system without relying on GPS-like techniques. The MAV find their navigation path by using their sensors and cameras, in order to identify and follow a series of visual landmarks. The visual landmarks lead the MAV towards the target destination. MAVs are assumed to be unaware of the terrain and locations of the landmarks. Landmarks are also assumed to hold a-priori information, whose interpretation (by the MAVs) is prone to errors. We distinguish two types of errors, namely, recognition and advice. Recognition errors are due to misinterpretation of sensed data and a-priori information or confusion of objects (e.g., due to faulty sensors). Advice errors are due to outdated or wrong information associated to the landmarks (e.g., due to weather conditions). Our path planning algorithm proposes swarm cooperation. MAVs communicate and exchange information wirelessly, to minimize the {\em recognition} and {\em advice} error ratios. By doing this, the navigation system experiences a quality amplification in terms of error reduction. As a result, our solution successfully provides an adaptive error tolerant navigation system. Quality amplification is parametetrized with regard to the number of MAVs. We validate our approach with theoretical proofs and numeric simulations.