Study And Application Of GPS For Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

MUAV (Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) which is widely applied both in military and civilian areas, has become one of the most popular research subjects in many institutions and organizations for a long time all over the world. Navigation and positioning systems for MUAV plays an important part in the autonomous flight. In this paper, we particularly emphasize on the study and application of the navigation and positioning systems for MUAV.As MUAV has a strict limitation for navigation instruments on volume, weight and cost, the routine navigation methods for large-scale planes are impossible to apply to MUAV. Considering the characteristics of MUAV, the author studied the application of GPS on its navigation and positioning system.Firstly, the paper gives a review of the current navigation and positioning methods, presents the development of satellite navigation and shows the structure of the navigation and positioning system for MUAV. The second chapter of this paper emphasizes on the structures of GPS and its navigation and positioning theories. In the third chapter, several differential GPS (DGPS) models are described and the precise measuring of the DGPS reference station coordinates is studied to give a more accurate navigation solution. An experiment to measure the DGPS reference station coordinates was carried through using our equipments and the result is given. The forth chapter mainly discusses the transformation from the GPS determined coordinates to local system. Rational simplification is made to the coordinates transformation formula of practical MUAV navigartion and the real-time dynamic positioning coordinates transformation formula is presented. Also, the validity and practicality are analyzed by using a calculation of examples. In the fifth chapter, concerning the disadvantages of GPS and inertial navigation, a research on the MIMU/GPS integrated navigation system is given. The simulation result shows that the integrated navigation system can give a better performance on accuracy, reliability and its anti-jamming ability. The future work of the navigation and positioning systemfor MUAV is discussed and prospected in the final part of this paper.