Development of a UAV Low-Cost Navigation System Prototype for ATM Applications

In the last years, the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) is gaining more prominence in different contexts and the scope of applications that they potentially can cover is dramatically increasing. In this context, UAVs present some advantages with respect to manned aircrafts for military, scientific and security applications and to contractor supplied services. Some examples of these applications are the support and information gathering in warzone, climate monitoring and aerial photogrammetry, borders, forest or road traffic surveillance and oil and gas pipeline monitoring. This paper focuses on the development of a low-cost navigation subsystem to be carried on board a fleet of UAVs and also in the ground deployment of a GNSS augmentation service to ensure the necessary system navigation performance. This navigation subsystem is developed for the research and development of a new generation of Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems in the frame of the project ATLANTIDA ("Application of Leader Technologies to Unmanned Airships for the Investigation and Development in ATM"), led by Boeing Research and Technology Europe. The motivation behind the use of UAVs is that they are cheaper (either from an economical, environmental and logistical point of view) than using manned aircrafts for the testing of the new ATM concepts. These UAVs, due to the nature of the application they have been designed for, shall estimate a state vector that goes far beyond the classical Position-Velocity-Attitude- Time solution (PVAT). In this context, this paper details the architecture intricacies of the navigation system prototype and the different sensors and instruments that compose it and how the system is designed in order to satisfy the diverse requirements. The preliminary results of a van test are presented to show the performance of the INS/GNSS integration. The conclusions will discuss and analyze the performance of the navigation system prototype based on INS/GNSS integration in the context of the ATLANTIDA goals. Further works and recommendation will also be discussed.