Performance Evaluation of Vision Aided Inertial Navigation System Augmented with a Coded Aperture

Jamie R. Morrison, John F. Raquet, Michael J. Veth

Abstract:	Tremendous gains have been made in recent years towards achieving the goal of performing autonomous navigation of indoor micro air vehicles, however several considerable challenges remain. Perhaps the most significant obstacle is that satellite based navigation aids such as the Global Position System may either perform poorly or be altogether unavailable when used for indoor environments. An inertial navigation system is effective for indoor navigation applications because these systems do not rely on the reception of external signals and newer models are improving in performance while decreasing in size. However, smaller inertial navigation systems generally require additional sensing capabilities to correct inherent instabilities if they are to be used for an extended period of time. A camera based vision system offers the necessary sensing capabilities in a form that is increasingly available with greater imaging performance and lower size, weight and power requirements. A primary impediment to the adoption of vision aided inertial navigation systems however is ambiguity regarding scale. We propose resolving scale ambiguity by using a vision aided inertial navigation system that is augmented with a coded aperture, allowing estimation of both heading the range to features. Location estimation of each feature may then be estimated with respect to the global coordinate frame. The inertial navigation system is updated in a closed loop with an extended Kalman filter. Using the inertial navigation system, the Kalman filter predicts the location and covariance for each feature relative to the camera at the time of the next image capture. The residuals for the system update are the differences between the expected feature locations relative to the camera and the measured feature locations.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 2009 International Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 26 - 28, 2009 Disney's Paradise Pier Hotel Anaheim, CA
Pages:	61 - 73
Cite this article:	Morrison, Jamie R., Raquet, John F., Veth, Michael J., "Performance Evaluation of Vision Aided Inertial Navigation System Augmented with a Coded Aperture," Proceedings of the 2009 International Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, Anaheim, CA, January 2009, pp. 61-73.
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