GNSS-Free Visual-Inertial Navigation for Drones
Confidential project. Internal figures and numbers are not shown.
Overview
- Real-time drone navigation where GNSS is jammed.
- Absolute fixes from matching the downward camera to satellite imagery, fused with visual-inertial odometry.
- First year: methods on public data; then the sponsor’s drone.
Platform
Drone with an embedded GPU computer
Sensors
Downward camera, IMU
Environment
High altitude, GNSS jammed
Downward camera + IMU
VIO
Satellite-map matching
FusionVIO + absolute fixes
Navigation output
Highlighted: my part.
My Part
Which VIO survives high altitude
At several hundred meters many VIO systems lose scale. I picked the one that kept scale on every public sequence.
Pose-graph fusion
Each absolute fix becomes a factor on the VIO trajectory; the fused error is a small fraction of VIO alone.