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An area-based position and attitude estimation for unmanned aerial vehicle navigation

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Abstract

The paper aims to challenge non-GPS navigation problems by using visual sensors and geo-referenced images. An area-based method is proposed to estimate full navigation parameters (FNPs), including attitude, altitude and horizontal position, for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation. Our method is composed of three main modules: geometric transfer function, local normalized sobel energy image (LNSEI) based objective function and simplex-simulated annealing (SSA) based optimization algorithm. The adoption of relatively rich scene information and LNSEI, makes it possible to yield a solution robustly even in the presence of very noisy cases, such as multi-modal and/or multi-temporal images that differ in the type of visual sensor, season, illumination, weather, and so on, and also to handle the sparsely textured regions where features are barely detected or matched. Simulation experiments using many synthetic images clearly support noise resistance and estimation accuracy, and experimental results using 2367 real images show the maximum estimation error of 5.16 (meter) for horizontal position, 9.72 (meter) for altitude and 0.82 (degree) for attitude.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    XiaoChun Liu, QiFeng Yu, PengYu Guo, ZhiHui Lei & Yang Shang

  2. Hunan Key Laboratory of Videometrics and Vision Navigation, Changsha, 410073, China

    XiaoChun Liu, QiFeng Yu, PengYu Guo, ZhiHui Lei & Yang Shang

  3. Institute of Aviation Equipment, Naval Academy of Armament, Shanghai, 200000, China

    Hou Wang

  4. The Second Artillery Force of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Model Office at the First Academy of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, Beijing, 100076, China

    Dan Fu

Authors
  1. XiaoChun Liu
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  2. Hou Wang
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  3. Dan Fu
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  4. QiFeng Yu
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  5. PengYu Guo
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  6. ZhiHui Lei
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  7. Yang Shang
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Correspondence to XiaoChun Liu.

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Liu, X., Wang, H., Fu, D. et al. An area-based position and attitude estimation for unmanned aerial vehicle navigation. Sci. China Technol. Sci. 58, 916–926 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-015-5818-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-015-5818-z

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