A Low-cost Trajectory Estimation System for Drones and Rockets

Drone aircraft have become very popular during the last few years. These remote-controlled aircraft often rely on GPS receivers to track their position and velocity. However, it is often important for aircraft to measure other information that GPS cannot provide. Recent developments in single-board computers have facilitated the creation of cheap and effective embedded systems. This paper details the development and testing of a Raspberry Pi-based low-cost trajectory estimation system. Data acquired from a pitot probe, GPS receiver, altimeter, and accelerometer are fed into a Kalman filter to calculate a best-fit trajectory. The performance of the filter algorithm was evaluated using test case data. Further testing of the hardware and estimator performance will be performed during various future rocket test flights.