The Design of an Embedded Multi-Sensor Data Fusion System for Unmanned Surface Vehicle Navigation Based on Real Time Operating System

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of a practical multi-sensor data fusion system for unmanned surface vehicle (USV) navigation. The system employs an embedded Linux board as the main on-board control module to extract and preprocess raw measurements from various navigational sensors using the real time operating system (RTOS). An unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) based data fusion algorithm has been developed to fuse the obtained and preprocessed sensor measurements and provide more reliable and accurate estimations of USV's navigational data in real time. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the data fusion algorithm in reducing unpredicted errors of a standalone sensor.