Vision Assisted Navigation for Miniature Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (MAVs)

Abstract

One of the primary difficulties in flying airplanes of all sizes is navigation, or ensuring that the location and attitude of the airplane is known at all times. For large aerial systems, high-quality IMUs have been successfully used for decades. However, the weight, power, cost, and size restrictions of miniature-UAVs (MAVs) preclude the use of high-quality IMUs for navigation. For the past two and a half years, this contract has enabled the investigation of techniques for enabling high-quality navigation using a combination of low quality inertial sensors, visual sensors, and (when available) GPS. Specific areas of contribution from this project include: (1) real-time techniques for improving pose estimates on MAVs with GPS, (2) two proposed approaches for enabling GPS-denied navigation, (3) quantitative and analytical analyses of different navigation algorithms, and (4) GPS-denied navigation utilizing multiple agents. The contributions in each of these areas is discussed in this report.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 2009
Accession Number
ADA528433

Entities

People

  • Clark N. Taylor

Organizations

  • Brigham Young University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Sensors
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Algorithms
  • Autonomous Navigation
  • Computational Complexity
  • Control Systems
  • Fixed Wing Aircraft
  • Global Positioning Systems
  • Inertial Measurement Units
  • Inertial Navigation
  • Inertial Navigation Systems
  • Kalman Filters
  • Measurement
  • Navigation
  • Simultaneous Localization And Mapping
  • Three Dimensional
  • Two Dimensional
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Readers

  • Aerial Unmanned Vehicle Swarm Micro Periodontal Dentistry.
  • Inertial Navigation Systems.
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy
  • Space