Passive IR-UWB Localization System for UAV-Based Electric Facility Inspection During GPS Outage

Abstract

A practical localization system is proposed for a substation inspection unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) performing its mission under global positioning system (GPS) signal blockage. The sensor hardware consists of a single transmitter and a cruciform receiver array, which produces the range difference (RD) information used for UAV positioning. The use of impulse-radio ultra wide-band (IR-UWB) devices secures the robustness against RF interference often caused by an exogenous electromagnetic field. With this hardware configuration, the UAV localization can be formulated as the state estimation problem for an uncertain linear state space model and be solved by using the computationally efficient robust weighted least squares (RWLS) estimator. Since the standard RWLS estimator could be sensitive to the imperfectness of prior knowledge on the noise statistic, a geometric constraint expressed in terms of a UAV position is exploited to secure the reliable localization performance in practice. Through experimental results, it is verified that the proposed solution provides reliable UAV positioning performance despite using the imperfect measurement noise statistics for the localization system.