Observability-Aware Control for Quadrotor Formation Flight with Range-only Measurement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cooperative Localization is a promising approach to achieving safe quadrotor formation flight through precise positioning via low-cost inter-drone sensors. This paper develops an observability-aware control principle tailored to quadrotor formation flight with range-only inter-drone measurements. The control principle is based on a novel approximation of the local observability Gramian (LOG), which we name the Short-Term Local Observability Gramian (STLOG). The validity of STLOG is established by proving its link to directional estimation precision in nonlinear systems. We propose the Observability Predictive Controller (OPC), a receding-horizon controller that generates optimal inputs to enhance information gain in weakly observable state directions by maximizing the minimum eigenvalue of the STLOG. This reduces the risk of estimator divergence due to the unbounded growth of uncertainty in weakly observed state components. Monte Carlo simulations and flight experiments are conducted with quadrotors in a GNSS-denied ferrying mission, showing that the OPC improves positioning confidence and estimator robustness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".