Author(s) :

Roland Pratt, Dr. Ryan Farber.

Volume/Issue :

Abstract :

Celestial navigation has recently matured into a viable backup for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle positioning, while collaborative localization frameworks have shown the benefits of sharing relative and absolute measurements across swarms. Yet, integrating star-based fixes into multi-drone architectures remains largely unstudied. This review provides an overview of work on single-platform celestial sensing, cooperative localization, and analogous leader–follower systems, and synthesizes the results to predict that sparse, asynchronous celestial star fixes, injected as absolute factors into a distributed collaborative estimator and scheduled by sky-aware planners, could achieve sub-kilometer accuracy over day-long Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) outages and surpass the capability of any single drone. To achieve this, swarm-level celestial fusion could exploit spatial diversity, temporal compression, and drift-limiting loop closures. Key research gaps remain in confirming this prediction with experimental testing, optimal sensor distribution, the balance between inter-drone and celestial measurement noise, and ensuring sky visibility through information-aware planning. Addressing these challenges is critical for building resilient positioning systems in GNSS-denied environments.