Feature Following and Distributed Navigation Systems Development for a Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Low-Cost Sensors

This paper represents the development of feature following control and distributed navigation algorithms for a small unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a low-cost sensor unit. An efficient map-based feature generation and following control algorithm is developed. A distributed navigation system is designed for real-time attitude, position, and velocity estimation of the unmanned aircraft with a cascade filtering architecture, resulting in a fault-tolerant navigation system. The performance of the proposed feature following control and the cascaded navigation algorithm is demonstrated in both hardware-in-the-loop simulation and real flight test with application to feature tracking with a stabilized gimbaled camera onboard a small unmanned aerial vehicle.

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