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Feasibility of Using Synthetic Aperture Radar to Aid UAV Navigation

This study explores the potential of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to aid Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation when Inertial Navigation System (INS) measurements are not accurate enough to eliminate drifts from a planned trajectory. This problem can affect medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE)...

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Autores principales: Nitti, Davide O., Bovenga, Fabio, Chiaradia, Maria T., Greco, Mario, Pinelli, Gianpaolo
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4570324/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26225977
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s150818334
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author Nitti, Davide O.
Bovenga, Fabio
Chiaradia, Maria T.
Greco, Mario
Pinelli, Gianpaolo
author_facet Nitti, Davide O.
Bovenga, Fabio
Chiaradia, Maria T.
Greco, Mario
Pinelli, Gianpaolo
author_sort Nitti, Davide O.
collection PubMed
description This study explores the potential of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to aid Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation when Inertial Navigation System (INS) measurements are not accurate enough to eliminate drifts from a planned trajectory. This problem can affect medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) UAV class, which permits heavy and wide payloads (as required by SAR) and flights for thousands of kilometres accumulating large drifts. The basic idea is to infer position and attitude of an aerial platform by inspecting both amplitude and phase of SAR images acquired onboard. For the amplitude-based approach, the system navigation corrections are obtained by matching the actual coordinates of ground landmarks with those automatically extracted from the SAR image. When the use of SAR amplitude is unfeasible, the phase content can be exploited through SAR interferometry by using a reference Digital Terrain Model (DTM). A feasibility analysis was carried out to derive system requirements by exploring both radiometric and geometric parameters of the acquisition setting. We showed that MALE UAV, specific commercial navigation sensors and SAR systems, typical landmark position accuracy and classes, and available DTMs lead to estimate UAV coordinates with errors bounded within ±12 m, thus making feasible the proposed SAR-based backup system.
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spelling pubmed-45703242015-09-17 Feasibility of Using Synthetic Aperture Radar to Aid UAV Navigation Nitti, Davide O. Bovenga, Fabio Chiaradia, Maria T. Greco, Mario Pinelli, Gianpaolo Sensors (Basel) Article This study explores the potential of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to aid Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation when Inertial Navigation System (INS) measurements are not accurate enough to eliminate drifts from a planned trajectory. This problem can affect medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) UAV class, which permits heavy and wide payloads (as required by SAR) and flights for thousands of kilometres accumulating large drifts. The basic idea is to infer position and attitude of an aerial platform by inspecting both amplitude and phase of SAR images acquired onboard. For the amplitude-based approach, the system navigation corrections are obtained by matching the actual coordinates of ground landmarks with those automatically extracted from the SAR image. When the use of SAR amplitude is unfeasible, the phase content can be exploited through SAR interferometry by using a reference Digital Terrain Model (DTM). A feasibility analysis was carried out to derive system requirements by exploring both radiometric and geometric parameters of the acquisition setting. We showed that MALE UAV, specific commercial navigation sensors and SAR systems, typical landmark position accuracy and classes, and available DTMs lead to estimate UAV coordinates with errors bounded within ±12 m, thus making feasible the proposed SAR-based backup system. MDPI 2015-07-28 /pmc/articles/PMC4570324/ /pubmed/26225977 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s150818334 Text en © 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Nitti, Davide O.
Bovenga, Fabio
Chiaradia, Maria T.
Greco, Mario
Pinelli, Gianpaolo
Feasibility of Using Synthetic Aperture Radar to Aid UAV Navigation
title Feasibility of Using Synthetic Aperture Radar to Aid UAV Navigation
title_full Feasibility of Using Synthetic Aperture Radar to Aid UAV Navigation
title_fullStr Feasibility of Using Synthetic Aperture Radar to Aid UAV Navigation
title_full_unstemmed Feasibility of Using Synthetic Aperture Radar to Aid UAV Navigation
title_short Feasibility of Using Synthetic Aperture Radar to Aid UAV Navigation
title_sort feasibility of using synthetic aperture radar to aid uav navigation
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4570324/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26225977
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s150818334
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