Outdoor waypoint navigation with the AR.Drone quadrotor

This paper presents a framework to deal with outdoor navigation using an AR.Drone Parrot quadrotor. The proposed system runs in a centralized computer, the ground station, responsible for the communication with the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and for synthesizing the control signals during flight missions. The outdoor navigation is performed through using a layered control architecture, where a high-level control algorithm, designed from the kinematic differential equations describing the movement of the UAV, is used to generate reference signals for a low-level velocity controller. To feedback the controllers, the sensorial data provided by the AR.Drone onboard sensors and a GPS module are fused through a Kalman Filter, allowing getting a more reliable estimate of the UAV state. Finally, experimental results are presented, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.