Position and Orientation of an Aerial Vehicle through Chained, Vision-Based Pose Reconstruction

While a Global Positioning System (GPS) is the most widely used sensor modality for aircraft navigation, researchers have been motivated to investigate other navigational sensor modalities because of the desire to operate in GPS denied environments. Due to advances in computer vision and control theory, monocular camera systems have received growing interest as an alternative/collaborative sensor to GPS systems. Cameras can act as navigational sensors by detecting and tracking feature points in an image. One limiting factor in this method is the current inability to relate feature points as they enter and leave the camera …eld of view. The contribution of this paper is a new vision-based state estimation method that allows sets of feature points to be related such that the aircraft position and orientation can be correlated to previous GPS data so that GPS-like navigation can be maintained in denied environments.