QDR: A Quadrotor Dead Reckoning Framework

Quadrotors are used for variety of applications both outdoors and indoors. Among them are - deliveries, surveillance, transportation, mapping and more. To accomplish its tasks an accurate navigation solution is required. To that end, most quadrotors apply fusion between an inertial navigation system and other external sensors, such as global navigation satellite systems (outdoors) or vision (indoors/outdoors). Due to environmental or sensor constraints, in some portion of the trajectory, the navigation solution relies only on the inertial navigation system solution. Consequently, the navigation solution drifts in time due to errors and noise in the inertial sensors measurements. Motivated from the pedestrian dead reckoning approach, we propose the quadrotor dead-reckoning framework to mitigate the navigation solution drift in situations of pure inertial navigation. There, instead of a straight line trajectory, the quadrotor is flown with a periodic motion to enable peak to peak distance estimation. Simulation and experiments results show that the proposed approach greatly improves the accuracy of the navigation solution.