Large scale formation relative navigation with relative measurement time delay and communication jam

Relative navigation is one of the key technologies for formation missions, and is challenge for the time delay between different measurements and the communication jam between the navigation node and base station. This paper develops an efficient approach to deal with the relative range time delay, in this approach different relative range measurements are mapped to a uniform time node by using one step approximate prediction. Then an Extended Kalman Filter is designed to estimate the relative states. To handle the communication jam induced by special configuration, e.g., the relative distance is much longer than the baseline between the navigation nodes, a group (or more) of normal nodes with known relative states are chosen as the virtual base station, and a Federal Kalman Filter is developed. To demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach, we finally develop a relative trajectory simulator and relative navigation software for a large scale formation with 15 ships and 5 helicopters.