Gallo Eduardo, Barrientos Antonio
Centro de Automática y Robótica, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones, c/José Cutiérrez Abascal 2, 28006 Madrid, Spain.
Sensors (Basel). 2022 Jul 24;22(15):5518. doi: 10.3390/s22155518.
The navigation systems of autonomous aircraft rely on the readings provided by a suite of onboard sensors to estimate the aircraft state. In the case of fixed wing vehicles, the sensor suite is usually composed by triads of accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers, a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver, and an air data system (Pitot tube, air vanes, thermometer, and barometer), and it is often complemented by one or more digital cameras. An accurate representation of the behavior and error sources of each of these sensors, together with the images generated by the cameras, is indispensable for the design, development, and testing of inertial, visual, or visual-inertial navigation algorithms. This article presents realistic and customizable models for each of these sensors; a ready-to-use C++ implementation is released as open-source code so non-experts in the field can easily generate realistic results. The pseudo-random models provide a time-stamped series of the errors generated by each sensor based on performance values and operating frequencies obtainable from the sensor's data sheets. If in addition, the simulated true pose (position plus attitude) of the aircraft is provided, the camera model generates realistic images of the Earth's surface that resemble those taken with a real camera from the same pose.
自主飞行器的导航系统依靠一套机载传感器提供的读数来估计飞行器状态。对于固定翼飞行器而言，传感器套件通常由加速度计、陀螺仪和磁力计三元组、全球导航卫星系统（GNSS）接收器以及一个大气数据系统（皮托管、风向标、温度计和气压计）组成，并且通常还会辅以一个或多个数码相机。准确描述这些传感器中每一个的行为和误差源，以及相机生成的图像，对于惯性、视觉或视觉惯性导航算法的设计、开发和测试而言是必不可少的。本文针对这些传感器中的每一个都给出了逼真且可定制的模型；一个即用型的C++实现版本作为开源代码发布，以便该领域的非专业人员能够轻松生成逼真的结果。伪随机模型基于可从传感器数据表中获取的性能值和工作频率，提供每个传感器产生的带有时间戳的误差序列。此外，如果提供了飞行器的模拟真实姿态（位置加姿态），相机模型会生成类似于从相同姿态用真实相机拍摄的地球表面的逼真图像。
