DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF A POSE ESTIMATOR FOR QUADROTOR MAVS WITH MODIFIED DYNAMICS AND RANGE MEASUREMENTS

摘要

This paper presents the design and analysis of a pose estimator for quadrotor micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). The proposed design uses the dynamic model of the quadrotor with aerodynamic effects and uses the extended Kalman filter (EKF) formulation for state estimation. Range measurements to known locations, inertial measurements and height measurements are used for the estimation task. The purpose of the study is to evaluate the performance of the estimator when navigating through a changing indoor setting. The study investigates the effect of changing number of rannge measurements, different geometrical arrangements of range sensors and changing availability of confident height information on the performance of the estimator. Performance of the estimator for each scenario is numerically analyzed. Finally a criteria is proposed for selecting the sensors, number of range measurements, geometric location of sensors which facilitates accurate position estimation using the proposed method.