A New Velocity Meter Based on Hall Effect Sensors for UAV Indoor Navigation

This paper presents a new approach to enhance the indoor navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). During indoor flight missions, UAVs rely on the integration of inertial navigation systems (INS) and aiding sensors measurements to estimate the UAV’s navigation states. These aiding measurements may be position, velocity, or attitudes. For indoor environments, the presence of absolute positioning systems, such as Wi-Fi, as an aiding sensor is not always guaranteed. Therefore, alternative aiding sources are required to mitigate the drift exhibited in INS and enhance the navigation accuracy. Different sensors have been utilized to aid INS. These aiding sensors should be carefully chosen, as they should not exceed the cost, weight, size, and power consumption limitations of the UAV. This paper presents a new utilization of Hall effect sensors to act as a flying air odometer (Air-Odo) for quadcopter UAV and to aid the INS with velocity update. Testing results confirmed the capabilities of the new approach to aid the navigation solution through real experiments, with velocity update applied to an extended Kalman filter. The new approach enhanced the navigation solution by 98% when compared with the stand-alone INS solution.