Aided Inertial Navigation of Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using an Ultra-Wideband Real Time Localization System

Abstract

This paper presents an ultra-wideband (UWB) radio aided inertial navigation system (INS), estimating position, velocity and attitude (PVA), based on a low-cost microelectro-mechanical system (MEMS) Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). This ensures that a drift free INS is available for local unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation independent of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). The experimental results show that the presented integration of UWB and INS is promising for navigating independent of satellite-based positioning systems, and illustrates the possible enhancements that are possible when adding an additional vertical position measurement.