Autonomous UAV Navigation Research Articles

Autonomous Navigation of UAV in Foliage Environment

This paper presents a navigation system that enables small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles to navigate autonomously using a 2D laser range finder in foliage environment without GPS. The navigation f...

Study on Mission-Based UAV Autonomous Navigation System

To resolve the problem of mission-based UAV autonomous navigation, flight control system and navigation control system were designed and the navigation method based on finite state rough set theory was adopted. Firstly, the whole process of the mission was divided to get the state transition diagram using the finite state machine model, and then rough set theory was used to reduce the properties and finally a minimal rule set was obtained. The accuracy was proved by the experiment, and the method can meet the requirements of mission-based UAV navigation.

Distributed filtering over sensor networks for autonomous navigation of UAVs

The paper studies the problem of autonomous navigation of a multi-UAV system with the use of the Unscented Information Filter (UIF) and the Distributed Particle Filter (DPF). It is considered that $m$ UAV (helicopter) models are monitored by $n$ different ground stations. At each monitoring station a filter is used to track each UAV by fusing measurements which are provided by various UAV sensors, while by fusing the state estimates from the distributed local filters an aggregate state estimate for each UAV is obtained. The UIF and DPF estimated state vector is in turn used by a flatness-based controller that makes the UAV follow the desirable trajectories.

Autonomous flight and navigation of VTOL UAVs: from autonomy demonstrations to out-of-sight flights

Future applications of UAV systems will depend on the aircraft autonomous behavior and decision capabilities. Search and Rescue is one complex possible mission and is here taken as a case study. The ReSSAC project is a multidisciplinary project at ONERA. Its main challenges are related to the architectures and algorithms for autonomous decision and information processing onboard UAVs that perform their mission in cooperation with operators. The feasibility demonstrations and results of the project are intended to be reused and extended in further studies, projects and collaborations. A first step of the project was to develop an autonomous control architecture for our two rotorcraft. In this paper, we present the current status and preliminary achievements of the ReSSAC project, especially some records of past experimental flights with our autonomous aircraft. We further discuss ongoing studies and research perspectives.