# Decentralized Visual-Inertial-UWB Fusion for Relative State Estimation of Aerial Swarm

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.05138 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05138/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Distributed Visual-Inertial Cooperative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12770/) (2021)
- [Relative Localization of Mobile Robots with Multiple Ultra-WideBand Ranging Measurements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08842/) (2021)
- [Signature and Log-signature for the Study of Empirical Distributions Generated with GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03226/) (2022)
- [Towards agile multi-robot systems in the real world: Fast onboard tracking of active blinking markers for relative localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01172/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The collaboration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has become a popular research topic for its practicability in multiple scenarios. The collaboration of multiple UAVs, which is also known as aerial swarm is a highly complex system, which still lacks a state-of-art decentralized relative state estimation method. In this paper, we present a novel fully decentralized visual-inertial-UWB fusion framework for relative state estimation and demonstrate the practicability by performing extensive aerial swarm flight experiments. The comparison result with ground truth data from the motion capture system shows the centimeter-level precision which outperforms all the Ultra-WideBand (UWB) and even vision based method. The system is not limited by the field of view (FoV) of the camera or Global Positioning System (GPS), meanwhile on account of its estimation consistency, we believe that the proposed relative state estimation framework has the potential to be prevalently adopted by aerial swarm applications in different scenarios in multiple scales.