A Low-Cost Integrated System for Indoor and Outdoor Navigation of Miniature UAVs

This paper presents an hardware device and associated algorithms for the navigation of miniature rotorcraft-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Unlike many studies that focus on navigation solutions adapted to one single type of mission and environment, the proposed approach aims at simultaneously dealing with indoor and outdoor missions, as well as being robust to sensors' loss and/or faulty measurements. An hardware device with low-cost sensors is presented as well as algorithms that are used to estimate online the vehicle's state composed of its position, attitude and velocities. This estimation architecture, based on complementary and Kalman filters, enables measurement selection and fusion fromdifferent sensors, depending on the current environment (indoor or outdoor). Algorithms are described and simulation results are provided to illustrate and compare the performance of the proposed approach.