Design of an Extended Kalman Filter for UAV Localization

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in military and scientific research. Some miniaturized UAVs rely entirely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) for navigation. GPS is vulnerable to accidental or deliberate interference that can cause it to fail. It is not unusual, even in a benign environment, for a GPS outage to occur for periods of seconds to minutes. For UAVs relying solely on GPS for navigation such an event can be catastrophic. This paper proposes an extended Kalman filter approach to estimate the location of a UAV when its GPS connection is lost, using inter-UAV distance measurements. The results from a recent trial conducted by DSTO in Australia with three UAVs are presented. It is shown that the location of a manoeuvering UAV that has lost the GPS signal can be determined to an accuracy of within 40m of its true location simply by measuring the range to two other UAVs at known location, where the range measurement error has a zero mean and a standard deviation of 10m.