An Integrated UAV Navigation System Based on Aerial Image Matching

Author

Conte, Gianpaolo ; Doherty, Patrick

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. & Inf. Sci., Linkoping Univ., Linkoping

fYear

2008

fDate

1-8 March 2008

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

10

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility of using geo-referenced satellite or aerial images to augment an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation system in case of GPS failure. A vision based navigation system which combines inertial sensors, visual odometer and registration of a UAV on-board video to a given geo-referenced aerial image has been developed and tested on real flight-test data. The experimental results show that it is possible to extract useful position information from aerial imagery even when the UAV is flying at low altitude. It is shown that such information can be used in an automated way to compensate the drift of the UAV state estimation which occurs when only inertial sensors and visual odometer are used.

Keywords

Global Positioning System; aerospace robotics; aircraft navigation; distance measurement; image matching; inertial navigation; mobile robots; remotely operated vehicles; GPS failure; aerial image matching; flight test data; inertial sensors; integrated UAV navigation system; unmanned aerial vehicle; visual odometer; Data mining; Global Positioning System; Image matching; Image sensors; Machine vision; Satellite navigation systems; Sensor systems; State estimation; System testing; Unmanned aerial vehicles;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Aerospace Conference, 2008 IEEE

Conference_Location

Big Sky, MT

ISSN

1095-323X

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-1487-1

Electronic_ISBN

1095-323X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/AERO.2008.4526556

Filename

4526556