Employing smartphone as on-board navigator in unmanned aerial vehicles: implementation and experiments

Purpose – This study aims to investigate if smartphone sensors can be used in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) localization system. With the development of technology, smartphones have been tentatively used in micro-UAVs due to their lightweight, inexpensiveness and flexibility. In this study, a Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone is selected as an on-board sensor platform for UAV localization in Global Positioning System (GPS)-denied environments and two main issues are investigated: Are the phone sensors appropriate for UAV localization? If yes, what are the boundary conditions of employing them? Design/methodology/approach – Efficient accuracy estimation methodologies for the phone sensors are proposed without using any expensive instruments. Using these methods, one can estimate his phone sensors accuracy at any time without special instruments. Then, a visual-inertial odometry scheme is introduced to evaluate the phone sensors-based path estimation performance. Findings – Boundary conditions of using smartphone in a UAV navigation system are found. Both indoor and outdoor localization experiments are carried out and experimental results validate the effectiveness of the boundary conditions and the corresponding implemented scheme. Originality/value – With the phone as a payload, UAVs can be further realized in smaller scale at lower cost, which will be used widely in the field of industrial robots.