A Proposed Framework for UAS Positioning in GPS-Denied and GPS-Spoofed Environments

Unmanned Aerial Systems have become ubiquitous and are now widely used in commercial, consumer, and military applications. Their widespread use is due to a combination of their low cost, high capability, and ability to perform tasks and go places that are not easy or safe for humans. Most UAS platforms are dependent on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), to provide positioning information for navigation and flight control. Without reliable GPS signals, the flight path cannot be trusted, and flight safety cannot be assured. However, GPS is vulnerable to several types of malicious attacks, including jamming, spoofing, or physical attacks on the GPS constellation itself. Additionally, there are environments in which GPS reception is not always possible, a key example being urban canyon areas where line-of-site to the GPS satellite constellation may be blocked or obscured by large obstacles such as buildings. Numerous methods have been proposed for position estimation in GPS denied environments. However, these methods have significant limitations and typically exhibit poor performance in certain environments and scenarios. This paper analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of existing alternate positioning methods and describes a framework where multiple positioning solutions are jointly employed to construct an optimal position estimate. The proposed framework aims to reduce computation complexity of and yield good positioning performance across a wide variety of environments.