Testing GPS/INS Integration for Autonomous Mini and Micro Aerial Vehicles

S. Winkler, H.-W. Schulz, M. Buschmann and P. Vörsmann

Abstract:	Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) describes a category of aircraft with dimensions roughly comparable to small birds. As the smallest, powered aircraft, MAVs can carry various sensors as payload to support civil and military missions such as traffic monitoring, weather observation, and enemy surveillance during military conflicts. The work presented in this paper is a pre-work for the navigation system of the fully autonomous MAV AutoMAV whose soft- and hardware for the on-board navigation and flight control system is under development at the Institute of Aerospace Systems. In general, in order to carry out sophisticated missions and to obtain a good flight performance of fully autonomous MAVs, a reliable navigation solution, especially of the attitude, is of significant importance. For this, an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) based on microelectro-mechanical systems (MEMS) was tightly-coupled (usage of GPS raw data) with a single frequency standalone GPS receiver. But instead of using GPS range and delta-range measurements in order to aid the Inertial Navigation System (INS) based on the MEMS-based IMU, the delta-range measurements were replaced by time-differenced carrier phase measurements. Key idea of this method is to use the high accuracy of a carrier phase measurement without solving the integer ambiguity and to improve the velocity accuracy and, hence, the attitude accuracy. Subject of this paper is the influence of the distance between IMU and GPS antenna, the position of the GPS antenna relative to the IMU and the number of GPS antennas used on the navigation accuracy (position, velocity, attitude). The results presented are based on Monte Carlo simulations. They are not limited to small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV).
Published in:	Proceedings of the 18th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2005) September 13 - 16, 2005 Long Beach Convention Center Long Beach, CA
Pages:	999 - 1006
Cite this article:	Winkler, S., Schulz, H.-W., Buschmann, M., Vörsmann, P., "Testing GPS/INS Integration for Autonomous Mini and Micro Aerial Vehicles," Proceedings of the 18th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2005), Long Beach, CA, September 2005, pp. 999-1006.
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