Field Test Results of GNSS-denied Inertial Navigation aided by Phased-array Radio Systems for UAVs

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) often depend on global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) and magnetic compasses for navigation, making them exposed to malicious attacks and sensitive to magnetic anomalies, while restricting operations to within GNSS coverage. By rather relying on inertial navigation aided by spherical position measurements from a phased-array radio system (PARS), these vulnerabilities are avoided. The navigation system relies on a multiplicative extended Kalman filter for state corrections, and on outlier rejection to mitigate effects of radio reflections. Field testing shows that, despite the higher levels of noise in the PARS signal, the PARS-based position, velocity and attitude estimates are satisfactory when compared to the autopilot based attitude and velocity and the real-time kinematic (RTK) GNSS position reference solution.