Route Planning for Accurate Localization Under Uncertainty

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a route planning method to keep the accurate localization for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) which use a camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). The dead reckoning with the IMU and visual odometry (VO) using the camera can be used for the self-localization in an unknown and GPS-denied environment. Both techniques cause estimation errors with motion, but the VO has less error accumulation than the dead reckoning. Therefore, we developed a method of modeling the predicted routes to calculate the error variance as an objective function. In addition, this approach enables determination of the posture of a UAV equipped with a camera with a high number of degrees of freedom. The simulation results show the accuracy of the proposed method, and confirm that it has a certain error improvement effect in any environment.