Survey on UAV navigation in GPS denied environments

Abstract

In the Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) navigation the main challenge is estimating and maintaining the accurate values of UAVs position and orientation. The onboard Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) provide the measurements but it is mainly affected from the accumulated error due to drift in measurements. Traditionally the Global Position System (GPS) measurements of vehicles position data can be fused with IMU measurements to compensate the accumulated error, But the GPS signals is not available everywhere and it will be degraded or fully not available in hostile areas, building structures and water bodies. Researchers already evolved methods to handle the UAV navigation in GPS denied environment by using Vision based navigation like Visual Odometry (VO) and Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM). In this survey paper we attempted to understand the existing research towards vision based navigation and finally proposed a Modular Multi-Sensor Data Fusion technique for UAV navigation in the GPS denied environment.