Accelerometer Bias Estimation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Extended Kalman Filter-Based Vision-Aided Navigation

Accurate estimation of accelerometer biases in Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) is crucial for reliable Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation, particularly in GPS-denied environments. Uncompensated biases lead to an unbounded accumulation of position error and increased velocity error, resulting in significant navigation inaccuracies. This paper examines the effects of accelerometer bias on UAV navigation accuracy and introduces a vision-aided navigation system. The proposed system integrates data from an IMU, altimeter, and optical flow sensor (OFS), employing an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to estimate both the accelerometer biases and the UAV position and velocity. This approach reduces the accumulation of velocity and positional errors. The efficiency of this approach was validated through simulation experiments involving a UAV navigating in circular and straight-line trajectories. Simulation results show that the proposed approach significantly enhances UAV navigation performance, providing more accurate estimates of both the state and accelerometer biases while reducing error growth through the use of vision aiding from an Optical Flow Sensor.