Integrated relative navigation using a low cost vision sensor for an autonomous aerial vehicle

Despite precise relative positioning performance of a differential GPS based navigation system, it requires the reference station in close boundaries and is likely to be affected by satellite observation environments. In this background, this paper presents an INS and vision sensor integrated system, which uses a combination of feature points and the landmark whose position is preliminarily known in order to overcome the limitation of GPS/INS integrated system. The proposed system has the advantage of implementing three-dimensional navigation using the geometry of landmark images. The simulation verifies the estimation accuracy of integrated navigation system, by which the performance enhancement in estimating relative position of the aerial vehicle is proved explicitly.