Abstract
Quadrotor usage is continuously increasing for both civilian and military applications such as surveillance, mapping, and deliveries. Commonly, quadrotors use an inertial navigation system combined with a global navigation satellite systems receiver for outdoor applications and a camera for indoor/outdoor applications. For various reasons, such as lighting conditions or satellite signal blocking, the quadrotor’s navigation solution depends only on the inertial navigation system solution. As a consequence, the navigation solution drifts in time due to errors and noises in the inertial sensor measurements. To handle such situations and bind the solution drift, the quadrotor dead reckoning (QDR) approach utilizes pedestrian dead reckoning principles. To that end, instead of flying the quadrotor in a straight line trajectory, it is flown in a periodic motion, in the vertical plane, to enable peak-to-peak (two local maximum points within the cycle) distance estimation. Although QDR manages to improve the pure inertial navigation solution, it has several shortcomings as it requires calibration before usage, provides only peak-to-peak distance, and does not provide the altitude of the quadrotor. To circumvent these issues, we propose QuadNet, a hybrid framework for quadrotor dead reckoning to estimate the quadrotor’s three-dimensional position vector at any user-defined time rate. As a hybrid approach, QuadNet uses both neural networks and model-based equations during its operation. QuadNet requires only the inertial sensor readings to provide the position vector. Experimental results with DJI’s Matrice 300 quadrotor are provided to show the benefits of using the proposed approach.
Highlights
Academic Editor: Sergio Toral MarínIn the last decade, quadrotor usage for both civilian and military applications has significantly increased in applications such as construction, transportation, surveillance, industry, marine science, mapping, military, emergency response, and law enforcement.In construction and industry, quadrotors are used to examine the condition of structures, machinery, or infrastructure located in remote areas or at high altitudes
The main difference is that after the inertial sensor raw data goes through the convolution neural networks (CNN) layers for feature extraction, they are fed through long short-term memory (LSTM) layers for the regression process
The root mean square error (RMSE) metric and the distance error at the end of the trajectory were chosen as the performance measure, where the RMSE was used for both the distance and height
Summary
Quadrotor usage for both civilian and military applications has significantly increased in applications such as construction, transportation, surveillance, industry, marine science, mapping, military, emergency response, and law enforcement. Motivated by the pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) approach using the smartphone inertial sensors [20,21,22], QDR requires the quadrotor to be flown in a periodic motion trajectory instead of a straight line trajectory. In this manner, similar to step-length detection and estimation in PDR, the peak-to-peak change in distance of the quadrotor is estimated. We propose QuadNet, a hybrid DL-framework for quadrotor dead reckoning enabling three-dimensional position estimation at any user-defined time rate using only inertial sensor readings.
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