State Estimation and Control of an Unmanned Air Vehicle from a Ground-Based 3D Laser Scanner

Abstract

In this work, we present a system to estimate the state of and control an Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) from a ground-based 3D laser scanner. The main contributions of this work are on data fusion between a low-frequency 3D laser scanner with considerable delay and an on-board 6-DOF IMU, and on automatic position control of a UAV using state estimate obtained from the fusion. We measured laser delay using data from a manually controlled flight. We have devised a method to perform online estimation and compensation of accelerometer offset using delay-corrected laser measurement. We then use the UAV state estimation in a nested controller with a high-frequency velocity control inner loop and a low-frequency position control outer loop. We demonstrated the state estimation and control in a series of experiments on velocity control and position control, including a comparison between position control using fusion data and only laser data.