Feature Based Navigation for UAVs

Author

Kong, W.Y. ; Egan, G.K. ; Cornall, T.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Syst. Eng., Monash Univ., Melbourne, Vic.

fYear

2006

fDate

9-15 Oct. 2006

Firstpage

3539

Lastpage

3543

Abstract

Most UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) today use the GPS (Global Positioning System) for navigation. While GPS is an accurate and usually reliable aid to navigation, it can be unavailable for various reasons. The aim of this project is to develop an alternative navigation method, which can be used when GPS transmissions are not available. The method suggested here is called feature based navigation. It works by comparing the current image taken by the on-board camera with previous reference images, usually the most recent, obtained when GPS was available. The system then compares locations of similar features extracted from the images using these to determine the location of UAV. We outline the results of the method using real data taken from the data log of a UAV in flight

Keywords

Global Positioning System; aerospace robotics; feature extraction; remotely operated vehicles; robot vision; Global Positioning System; feature based navigation; feature extraction; unmanned aerial vehicles; Cameras; Feature extraction; Global Positioning System; Image databases; Image storage; Laser radar; Radio navigation; Satellite navigation systems; Spatial databases; Unmanned aerial vehicles; GPS; UAV; features; navigation;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on

Conference_Location

Beijing

Print_ISBN

1-4244-0258-1

Electronic_ISBN

1-4244-0259-X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IROS.2006.281640

Filename

4058951