Fly, Track, Land: Infrastructure-less Magnetic Localization for Heterogeneous UAV-UGV Teaming

Abstract:Persistent air ground robot teams require nano UAVs that can leave a mobile UGV, perform short scouting or inspection tasks, and reliably return to a compact landing interface. This final docking phase remains difficult: it demands centimeter-scale relative localization on a moving platform, while nano UAVs provide only a few grams of payload and severe onboard sensing, power, and computation constraints. We address this problem with an infrastructure-less magneto inductive anchor-tag localization system for heterogeneous UAV-UGV teaming. Unlike passive magnetic docking aids or approaches exploiting environmental magnetic features, the proposed system actively generates a frequency multiplexed AC magnetic field on the UGV and uses it as an onboard localization reference for closed loop flight. The nano UAV carries only a lightweight passive receive coil and estimates its 3D position directly in the UGV frame, providing a local close range reference for hovering, tracking, and landing without external anchors, visual fiducials, GNSS, or motion capture online. The magnetic estimate is fused with the native onboard sensing stack, enabling operation under nano UAV SWaP constraints. Experiments with a Unitree A1 quadruped and a Crazyflie nano UAV, evaluated against motion capture ground truth, show centimeter level accuracy in static hovering and landing and approximately 8-11 cm RMSE during UGV motion, while the flow only baseline frequently violates the safety bound and fails the task.

Revised version submitted to Robotics and Autonomous Systems (Elsevier). Supplementary video available

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2603.08926 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2603.08926v2 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.08926 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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