Enhanced UAV Indoor Navigation through SLAM-Augmented UWB Localization

Abstract

Current developments in unmanned aerial vehicle technology hold great potential for productive deployment in industrial cyber-physical systems. While autonomous flight in outdoor environments is achieved using global navigation satellite systems, dedicated precise wireless localization is a promising candidate to enable indoor navigation. However, equipping large industrial areas with wireless localization is possible, but providing the required coverage may not be economical. Therefore, this work aims to augment and fuse state of the art ultra-wideband localization with monocular simultaneous localization and mapping to enable autonomous flight in areas not covered by wireless localization. For the in-depth validation of the proposed approach, two experiments are performed: the first one is providing an extensive experimental analysis of the accuracy of different localization methods for drones, whereas the second experiment is showing that precise waypoint flight in areas not covered by wireless localization is feasible, lowering the threshold for integration of drone-based cyber-physical systems in current industrial environments.