Missing data reconstruction in attitude for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle based on deep regression model with different sensor failures

Abstract

Forming a UAV cluster with multiple UAVs to collaborate in accomplishing tasks is the future development of battlefield. The UAV cluster can collaborate by communicating through inter-aircraft links and can quickly and accurately perform complex tasks such as path planning, collaborative reconnaissance, collaborative sensing and attack. In the process of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) cooperative operation, obtaining the real-time attitude information of each UAV is preliminary to implement collaborative cooperation. However, in practice, due to the internal malfunction of sensors and mutual interference among UAVs, the acquired attitudes often suffer from data missing. This paper proposed a novel missing data reconstruction method for UAV’s attitude in the case of sensor failures. The attitude data of UAV is obtained through an advanced UAV simulation platform AirSim. Through fusing the temporal convolutional network (TCN) and Bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM), a deep regression framework is established for missing data construction. In addition, we evaluate the reliability of the proposed method by comparing with different baseline models and different combinations of data missing. The performance of our method is quantified using metrics of root-mean-square-error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), determination coefficient (DC), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and symmetric mean absolute percentage error (SMAPE) score. The averaged performance values of our proposed method outperform other baseline algorithms. The results of the experiment show that the study could well-address the issue of missing data reconstruction and provide reliable attitude data.