Navigation of UAV in Denied GNSS Environments Using Multi-Sensor Systems [article]

Mostafa Mohamed Ahmed Mostafa, University Of Calgary, University Of Calgary, Naser El-Sheimy, A. B. Sesay
2018
There have been extensive market demands over the past 10 years for deploying small autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in enormous civil and military applications such as search and rescue, disaster management, firefighting, reconnaissance and border mentoring. While UAVs are performing their missions, they are typically relying on the onboard Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)/ Inertial Navigation System (INS) integrated navigation system for the positioning and localization
more » ... ose. During such missions, the GNSS signals could be prone to blockage, attenuation, multipath effect, jamming and spoofing. In such complicated scenarios, the navigation solution is acquired by the INS in standalone mode prior to the GNSS signals recovery. Consequently, the navigation solution will deteriorate rapidly because of the drift exhibited by the low-cost INS during GNSS signal outages. Therefore, the necessity for an accurate and reliable navigation system in such cluttered environments is essential to achieve their missions. A variety of sensors and techniques have been exploited in an attempt to provide a reliable navigation solution in GNSS-denied environments. Although these sensors have some strengths individually, they still suffer from some limitations. Monocular Visual Odometry (VO) has been proposed as a GNSS denied environment navigation system for UAVs since it has light weight, small size and low power consumption. This monocular VO suffer from the scale ambiguity if there is no other aiding sensor or prior information of the observed scene. Furthermore, it depends on a rigorous calibrated camera and system model which may change from one flight to another or even during the flight. Therefore, a novel monocular VO based on optical flow and regression tress is proposed which eliminates the need for a calibration phase and inherently models the interior camera parameters, its lever arm and boresight parameters since, the relationship between the actual optical flow vectors and the navigation states are [...]
doi:10.11575/prism/32809 fatcat:xe3cgt34evdevd4wqo7uv4dbsi