Heavy reliance on GPS is preventing unmanned air systems (UAS) from being fully inte- grated for many of their numerous applications. In the absence of GPS, GPS-reliant UAS have difficulty estimating vehicle states resulting in vehicle failures. Additionally, naively using erro- neous measurements when GPS is available can result in significant state inaccuracies. We present a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) solution to GPS-degraded navigation that al- lows vehicle state estimation and control independent of global information. Optionally, a global map can be constructed from odometry measurements and can be updated with GPS measurements while maintaining robustness against outliers.We detail a relative navigation SLAM framework that distinguishes a relative front end and global back end. It decouples the front-end flight critical processes, such as state estimation and control, from back-end global map construction and optimization. Components of the front end function relative to a locally-established coordinate frame, completely independent from global state information. The approach maintains state estimation continuity in the absence of GPS mea- surements or when there are jumps in the global state, such as after map optimization. A global graph-based SLAM back end complements the relative front end by constructing and refining a global map using odometry measurements provided by the front end.Unlike typical approaches that use GPS in the front end to estimate global states, our unique back end uses a virtual zero and virtual constraint to allow intermittent GPS measurements to be applied directly to the map. Methods are presented to reduce the scale of GPS induced costs and refine the map’s initial orientation prior to optimization, both of which facilitate convergence to a globally consistent map. The approach uses a state-of-the-art robust least-squares optimization algorithm called dynamic covariance scaling (DCS) to identify and reject outlying GPS measure- ments and loop closures. We demonstrate our system’s ability to generate globally consistent and aligned maps in GPS-degraded environments through simulation, hand-carried, and flight test re- sults.

Most micro air vehicles rely heavily on reliable GPS measurements for proper estimation and control, and therefore struggle in GPS-degraded environments. When GPS is not available, the global position and heading of the vehicle is unobservable. This dissertation establishes the theoretical and practical advantages of a relative navigation framework for MAV navigation in GPS-degraded environments. This dissertation explores how the consistency, accuracy, and stability of current navigation approaches degrade during prolonged GPS dropout and in the presence of heading uncertainty. Relative navigation (RN) is presented as an alternative approach that maintains observability by working with respect to a local coordinate frame. RN is compared with several current estimation approaches in a simulation environment and in hardware experiments. While still subject to global drift, RN is shown to produce consistent state estimates and stable control. Estimating relative states requires unique modifications to current estimation approaches. This dissertation further provides a tutorial exposition of the relative multiplicative extended Kalman filter, presenting how to properly ensure observable state estimation while maintaining consistency. The filter is derived using both inertial and body-fixed state definitions and dynamics. Finally, this dissertation presents a series of prolonged flight tests, demonstrating the effectiveness of the relative navigation approach for autonomous GPS-degraded MAV navigation in varied, unknown environments. The system is shown to utilize a variety of vision sensors, work indoors and outdoors, run in real-time with onboard processing, and not require special tuning for particular sensors or environments. Despite leveraging off-the-shelf sensors and algorithms, the flight tests demonstrate stable front-end performance with low drift. The flight tests also demonstrate the onboard generation of a globally consistent, metric, and localized map by identifying and incorporating loop-closure constraints and intermittent GPS measurements. With this map, mission objectives are shown to be autonomously completed.

Micro air vehicles have recently gained popularity due to their potential as autonomous systems. Their future impact, however, will depend in part on how well they can navigate in GPS-denied and GPS-degraded environments. In response to this need, this dissertation investigates a potential solution for GPS-denied operations called relative navigation. The method utilizes keyframe-to-keyframe odometry estimates and their covariances in a global back end that represents the global state as a pose graph. The back end is able to effectively represent nonlinear uncertainties and incorporate opportunistic global constraints. The GPS-denied research community has, for the most part, neglected to consider fixed-wing aircraft. This dissertation enables fixed-wing aircraft to utilize relative navigation by accounting for their sensing requirements. The development of an odometry-like, front-end, EKF-based estimator that utilizes only a monocular camera and an inertial measurement unit is presented. The filter uses the measurement model of the multi-state-constraint Kalman filter and regularly performs relative resets in coordination with keyframe declarations. In addition to the front-end development, a method is provided to account for front-end velocity bias in the back-end optimization. Finally a method is presented for enabling multiple vehicles to improve navigational accuracy by cooperatively sharing information. Modifications to the relative navigation architecture are presented that enable decentralized, cooperative operations amidst temporary communication dropouts. The proposed framework also includes the ability to incorporate inter-vehicle measurements and utilizes a new concept called the coordinated reset, which is necessary for optimizing the cooperative odometry and improving localization. Each contribution is demonstrated through simulation and/or hardware flight testing. Simulation and Monte-Carlo testing is used to show the expected quality of the results. Hardware flight-test results show the front-end estimator performance, several back-end optimization examples, and cooperative GPS-denied operations.

Micro aerial vehicles and other autonomous systems have the potential to truly transform life as we know it, however much of the potential of autonomous systems remains unrealized because reliable navigation is still an unsolved problem with significant challenges. This dissertation presents solutions to many aspects of autonomous navigation. First, it presents ROSflight, a software and hardware architure that allows for rapid prototyping and experimentation of autonomy algorithms on MAVs with lightweight, efficient flight control. Next, this dissertation presents improvments to the state-of-the-art in optimal control of quadrotors by utilizing the error-state formulation frequently utilized in state estimation. It is shown that performing optimal control directly over the error-state results in a vastly more computationally efficient system than competing methods while also dealing with the non-vector rotation components of the state in a principled way. In addition, real-time robust flight planning is considered with a method to navigate cluttered, potentially unknown scenarios with real-time obstacle avoidance. Robust state estimation is a critical component to reliable operation, and this dissertation focuses on improving the robustness of visual-inertial state estimation in a filtering framework by extending the state-of-the-art to include better modeling and sensor fusion. Further, this dissertation takes concepts from the visual-inertial estimation community and applies it to tightly-coupled GNSS, visual-inertial state estimation. This method is shown to demonstrate significantly more reliable state estimation than visual-inertial or GNSS-inertial state estimation alone in a hardware experiment through a GNSS-GNSS denied transition flying under a building and back out into open sky. Finally, this dissertation explores a novel method to combine measurements from multiple agents into a coherent map. Traditional approaches to this problem attempt to solve for the position of multiple agents at specific times in their trajectories. This dissertation instead attempts to solve this problem in a relative context, resulting in a much more robust approach that is able to handle much greater intial error than traditional approaches.