INS/GPS fusion architectures for unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present fusion of inertial navigation system (INS) and global positioning system (GPS) for estimating position, velocities, attitude and heading of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Design/methodology/approach – A 15-state extended Kalman filter (EKF) and a split architecture consisting of six-state nonlinear complementary filter (NCF) and nine-state EKF are investigated in detail. In both these fusion architectures GPS and inertial measurement unit consisting of three axis accelerometers, three axis rate gyros and three axis magnetometer have been fused in open loop fashion (loosely coupled) to estimate the navigation states. Findings – These architectures have been implemented in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment and evaluated in closed loop guidance of Black-Kite MAV with software-in-the-loop-simulation (SILS) setup. Furthermore, both the algorithms are validated with flight test data obtained from on-board data logger using an off-the shelf autopilot board (Ardupilot Mega APM-2.5) on SLYBIRD UAV. Originality/value – The proposed architectures are of high value to accomplish INS/GPS fusion, which plays a vital role in autonomous guidance and navigation of an UAV.