Development of relative positioning algorithms for agricultural drone swarms in GPS-challenged environments

In recent years, agricultural drones have significantly increased use for tasks such as field irrigation, pest detection, and crop health monitoring. To improve operational efficiency and speed across extensive agricultural regions, the deployment of drone swarms is becoming increasingly prevalent. However, in remote regions where Global Positioning System (GPS) signals may be inaccurate or unavailable and realtime kinematic services are expensive, the need arises for effective methods to determine the precise relative positions of drones within a swarm.

The purpose of this work is to develop relative positioning algorithms for agricultural drone swarms in GPS-challenged environments. These algorithms should enable the determination of the relative positions of drones and the overall configuration of the swarm even in the complete absence of GPS signals. As a result of this study, an algorithm for determining the relative position of swarm elements in the absence of global positioning signals and the corresponding mathematical apparatus was developed. It takes into account possible inaccuracy of distance measurement.

Various configurations of possible relative positions of swarm elements, their impact on determining the relative position, and possible solutions to problems in case of an unsuccessful initial arrangement were analyzed. The obtained results were successfully confirmed by practical calculation.