A Low-cost Integrated Navigation System of Quadrotor Aerial Vehicle: Design, Development and Performance

Z. Zhou, J. Zhang, Y. Zeng, J. Bai, L. Yang

Abstract:	This paper proposes a low-cost multi-sensor integrated navigation system of QAV, emphasis on the design, development and its performance. Firstly, the overview of QAV and its platform of integrated navigation system is established and detailedly discussed. It consists of heterogeneous sensors including GPS receiver unit, 3-axis gyroscope/accelerometer, 3-axis digital magnetic compass (MC), digital barometric altimeter, navigation computer unit (NCU) and the STM32 micro-processer. The data from different sensor modules has been well timesynchronized by pulse-per-second (PPS) signal from GPS. An efficient integration algorithm is proposed and developed with dual filters architecture to fuse the navigation data, which involves three stages: (i) to weaken the noises of sensors, the position/velocity (PV) from GPS are pre-processed with 1st Kalman filtering (KF) and the outputs of gyroscope/accelerometer are prefiltered with a five-order finite impulse response low-pass filter. (ii) A 15-state error state model is established in the navigation frame. In order to improve fusion accuracy, both the heading and height information from magnetic compass and barometric altimeter are combined with the PV solutions of 1st KF to generate the observation model of 2nd centralized KF. (iii) The final integration solution is reversely used as the feedback for position, velocity and attitude (PVA) outputs from gyroscope/accelerometer. Finally, the real flight experiment is carried out to evaluate the efficiency and performance of our proposed low-cost integrated navigation system of QAV. The result indicates that the navigation system performs well in real time and significantly improves the flight accuracy and reliability. With the aid of our low-cost navigation platform, the navigation results coincides with the real flight very well and can be implemented in many potential application fields.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 26th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2013) September 16 - 20, 2013 Nashville Convention Center, Nashville, Tennessee Nashville, TN
Pages:	2114 - 2124
Cite this article:	Zhou, Z., Zhang, J., Zeng, Y., Bai, J., Yang, L., "A Low-cost Integrated Navigation System of Quadrotor Aerial Vehicle: Design, Development and Performance," Proceedings of the 26th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2013), Nashville, TN, September 2013, pp. 2114-2124.
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