Antenna Array Based Positioning Scheme for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Recently antenna arrays have been incorporated in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in order to improve their communications capacities. Such antenna arrays can be further exploited in order to provide accurate estimation of a UAV pose and attitude which are necessary for the UAV movement and control. In this paper, we propose a pose estimation solution based on the 2-D Standard ESPRIT with Forward Backward Averaging (FBA) for determining the directions of arrival (DOAs) of the incoming signals. Moreover, by exploiting the geometry of the antenna array, it is possible to estimate the antenna positions, and then, by applying the TRIAD algorithm, it is possible to compute the attitude. We show, by means of simulations, that our proposed solution provides a very accurate pose estimation.