Sensor Integrated Navigation for a Target Finding UAV

摘要

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight control and sensor data acquisition are typically decoupled in intelligence-related missions. In the archetypal case, a UAV flies pre-programmed GPS waypoints while an on-board sensor streams data to a ground control station observed by a human or post-processed for analysis. In this paper, we present work on a simple UAV system that incorporates sensor data to statistically minimize the time to autonomously locate an RF emitter on the ground. The demonstrated system uses a two-stage approach to finding the RF target: (1) randomized Lévy flight to search the ground space and, (2) simplex minimization to home in on the target. Flight tests showed that the UAV consistently located the target within 10m accuracy in a large outdoor field. Algorithm pseudocode, heat map plots, and supplementary videos of the UAV successfully executing its search task are presented.