INS/SMNS tightly-coupled navigation for unmanned aerial vehicle

To eliminate the drawback that INS (inertial navigation system) errors are accumulated with time, a tightly-coupled INS/SMNS (Scene Matching Navigation System) integrated navigation system is put forward for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). It can roughly position the UAV and correct the geometric distortion of real-time graph by INS-provided position and orientation information. Therefore, the real-time and precision in suitable-matching area of SMNS can be improved obviously. Meanwhile, the accumulation error of INS is corrected by using the high-accuracy positioning of SMNS. With the complementary advantages between SMNS and INS, the tightly-coupled INS/SMNS navigation system can obtain significantly improved real-time performance and accuracy. The experiment results show that the proposed system meets the route planning requirements of UAV.