ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 5 -- United States Patent no. 12,277,716, issued on April 15.
"Cooperative aircraft navigation" was invented by Gary Ellingson (Ogden, Utah), Timothy McLain (Provo, Utah) and Kevin Brink (Dayton, Ohio).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A UAS may use camera-captured ground feature data to iteratively estimate pose change through a Kalman filter. To avoid excessive drift, the UAS may periodically perform a reset by publishing delta pose and covariance as an edge in a global pose graph, by zeroing out the delta pose and covariance. To further improve global pose estimation, two UASs may share range information and associated pose graph information, thereby providing an addition...