Data Fusion of UWB and IMU Based on Unscented Kalman Filter for Indoor Localization of Quadrotor UAV

Abstract

The indoor location technique plays a essential role during the application of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). However, the control design problem for the quadrotor UAV is quite difficult in the indoor environment due to the weak GPS signal. Based on Ultra Wide Band (UWB), the related positioning issues can be solved of UAV through base station with known coordinate position and equipment with location tag, but it is difficult to meet the high-precision operation requirements. In this paper, an indoor positioning design method combined with the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and UWB positioning technology is proposed, which can effectively suppress the error accumulation of the IMU and further improve the positioning accuracy. Moreover, the system architecture for a class of quadrotor UAV is designed. The multisensor fusion technology based on unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is used to avoid neglecting the high-order terms of the nonlinear observation equations of UWB and IMU, which can effectively improve the accuracy of solving the nonlinear equations. Finally, a hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform is designed to verify the effectiveness of the indoor positioning method and improve the positioning accuracy.

Keywords

• Ultra wide band (UWB)
• inertial measurement unit (IMU)
• data fusion
• indoor localization
• quadrotor UAV