Multiview Target Estimation for Multicopter Swarm Interception

This study addresses the challenge of localizing hostile swarms observed by multiple multicopters in anti-drone systems. It investigates the dynamics of intercepting multicopter swarms, showing that cooperative actions significantly enhance autonomous interception success rates. A probabilistic framework, leveraging epipolar geometry and multicopter swarm dynamics, is proposed to improve target localization accuracy. This framework provides a unified target estimation solution for both multiple and single viewpoint scenarios, including cases with temporary target occlusion, and it mitigates camera imaging and processing delay effects. Hardware-in-loop (HIL) simulations and real-world flight experiments in various environments validate the approach’s effectiveness and robustness. Cooperative swarm interception is achieved using only onboard vision and computation.