Redundant configuration of low-cost inertial sensors for advanced navigation of small unmanned aerial systems

This paper presents an innovative integrated navigation unit developed for small unmanned aircraft systems, i.e. drones. It exploits an original redundant configuration of "consumer grade" Micro Electro-Mechanical Sensors to generate measurements that are compliant with specifications for drone navigation, both in terms of accuracy and integrity. To this aim, six boards equipped with inertial sensors are arranged in a cube containing triaxial gyros, accelerometers and magnetometers. This way, single sensor biases are preliminarily compensated by mutual calibration thanks to an average operation for quantities of each axis. To assess the performance of the proposed solution, the paper presents and discusses also the preliminary results obtained during an actual navigation test session.