Detection of unmanned aerial vehicle trajectory using overlapping images

Abstract

Currently, unmanned aerial vehicles are widely used with navigation based on data from onboard integrated systems including inertial and satellite sensors. In this case, to solve many target tasks, their preliminary exit to a given point of the flight route along the shortest horizontal trajectory is provided. However, in practice, there may be situations when the information received from navigation satellites may no longer be available, which leads to a decrease in navigation accuracy. Considered a technique for detecting the trajectory of unmanned aerial vehicles under conditions of loss of signals from navigation satellites using the underlying surface images. As a criterion indicating the occurrence of deviations of unmanned aerial vehicles from a specified trajectory, it is proposed to use the change in parallaxes of adjacent pairs of images. Analytical relations describing the functional relationship between changes in image parallaxes and parameters of linear and angular deviations of unmanned aerial vehicles from a specified trajectory. All possible options of these deviations are also considered. The obtained results provide an a priori estimate of the threshold value of parallax changes corresponding to the acceptable level of unmanned aerial vehicles deviations from the specified trajectory by means of modelling. Based on this estimate, it is possible to improve the accuracy of trajectory detection of unmanned aerial vehicles under conditions of loss of signals from navigation satellites.

Keywords

• aerial photography
• navigation
• image parallax
• inertial measurements
• loss of satellite signals