Determination of changes in the trajectory and orientation of unmanned aerial vehicles from overlapping images

Abstract

The article considers a method for determining abnormal changes in the trajectory and orientation of unmanned aerial vehicles in the conditions of loss of signals from satellites in the interests of improving the accuracy of navigation support for their exit to a given point of the horizontal flight route. The developed technique is based on the functional relationship of the difference in parallaxes of adjacent pairs of images obtained by the onboard camera of unmanned aerial vehicles during flight, with their deviations from the horizontal trajectory and changes in orientation. The obtained analytical relations allow for each corresponding point of a pair of images to form and solve a system of two nonlinear equations with five unknowns, which use deviations of unmanned aerial vehicles in altitude and direction of flight and their pitch, roll and yaw angles, approximate values of which are determined by the inertial navigation system. The procedures for the refinement of these parameters based on the math-ematical processing of the measurement results of the plane coordinates of the corresponding points by the method of least squares are presented. The proposed approach makes it possible to halve the minimum number of processed points and ensures the accuracy of determining the deviations of unmanned aerial vehicles from the horizontal trajectory and changes in its angular orientation, commensurate with the accuracy of satellite navigation.