Experimentation of Vision-aided Inertial Navigation System (VaINS) on a small fixed-wing UAV

This document describes an experiment using the Vision-aided Inertial Navigation System (VaINS). The system collects and processes sensor data. It transmits the navigation solution to an operator terminal in real-time. This is the first experiment with VaINS on a fixed-wing UAV, where it was used as a data-logging box. This experiment was a collaboration activity between FFI and NORCE, who operated the UAV. The data were collected over two days with five flights overlooking buildings, vegetation, a river, a lake, and mountains. The pitch angle of the camera was varied between grazing angles 22˚, 25˚ and 90˚ downwards. The primary objective of this experiment was to experience the use of the VaINS-box on a fixed-wing UAV and to study the performance of the image-aided navigation. The navigation solution of the image-aided INS is compared with the reference solution within GPS denied time intervals. The flights with camera pitch angle at 90˚ performed slightly better than the flights with grazing angles. Comparing the image-aided solution with the free inertial solution in the GPS denied periods, the image-aided navigation performed significantly better in the linear flights.