Quadrotor Inertial Navigation Aided by a Vehicle Dynamics Model with In-Flight Parameter Estimation

Philipp Crocoll, Gert F. Trommer

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	Today’s low-cost inertial measurement units are not yet sufficient for stand-alone navigation even for short times. This rises the need for aiding measurements in the navigation system. To avoid the increased system cost induced by additional sensors, model-aided navigation aims at providing aiding information based on a Vehicle Dynamics Model. While this technique shows promising results for bridging GNSS outages in recent publications, it also introduces additional engineering effort because an appropriate system identification is required before the flight. This paper demonstrates that this effort can largely be eliminated by performing the parameter estimation automatically during the beginning of the flight. Several methods were implemented and compared in flight experiments. It is shown that very short times are required for parameter estimation and that the obtained position accuracy is even better than with parameter estimation before the flight.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 27th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2014) September 8 - 12, 2014 Tampa Convention Center Tampa, Florida
Pages:	1784 - 1795
Cite this article:	Crocoll, Philipp, Trommer, Gert F., "Quadrotor Inertial Navigation Aided by a Vehicle Dynamics Model with In-Flight Parameter Estimation," Proceedings of the 27th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2014), Tampa, Florida, September 2014, pp. 1784-1795.
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