Feature following and distributed navigation systems development for a small unmanned aerial vehicle with low-cost sensors

This paper represents the development of feature following control and distributed navigation algorithms for a small unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a low-cost sensor unit. An efficient map-based feature generation and following control algorithm is developed. A distributed navigation system is designed for real-time attitude, position, and velocity estimation of the unmanned aircraft with a cascade filtering architecture, resulting in a fault-tolerant navigation system. The performance of the proposed feature following control and the cascaded navigation algorithm is demonstrated in both hardware-in-the-loop simulation and real flight test with application to feature tracking with a stabilized gimbaled camera onboard a small unmanned aerial vehicle.