Commercial MAV Velocity Estimation Using Gaussian Process Regression for Drift Reduction
Kenny A. Q. Caldas, Roberto Santos Inoue, Marco H. Terra · 2022 IEEE Sensors · 2022
We propose in this work a non-parametric Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model to estimate reduced drift velocity of a commercial Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) by using a single additional Inertial Measurement Unit and odometry data, without relying on expensive or processing demanding sensors. The main advantage of this approach is that it does not require sensor calibration and parameter tuning for accurate velocity estimation. We considered three different kernels in the GPR training and evaluated the proposed method on two datasets. The results are compared with the MAV odometry and a Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm against ground truth data obtained from a high precision motion tracking system. Our proposed method demonstrates superior performance in both datasets and provides a viable solution to roduce position drift on commercial MAVs.