The indoor environment has brought new challenges for micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in terms of their being able to execute tasks with high positioning accuracy. Conventional positioning methods based on GPS are unreliable, although certain circumstances of limited space make it possible to apply new technologies. In this paper, we propose a novel indoor self-positioning system of UAV based on a heterogeneous sensing system, which integrates data from a structured light scanner, ultra-wideband (UWB), and an inertial navigation system (INS). We made the structured light scanner, which is composed of a low-cost structured light and camera, ourselves to improve the positioning accuracy at a specified area. We applied adaptive Kalman filtering to fuse the data from the INS and UWB while the vehicle was moving, as well as Gauss filtering to fuse the data from the UWB and the structured light scanner in a hovering state. The results of our simulations and experiments demonstrate that the proposed strategy significantly improves positioning accuracy in motion and also in the hovering state, as compared to using a single sensor.
Keywords: data fusion; heterogeneous sensing system; indoor positioning; unmanned aerial vehicle.