Experimentation of an Integrated Vision-Aided Inertial Navigation System with Orthophoto Matching on a Fixed-Wing UAV

This paper presents the work on integrating our Vision-Aided Inertial Navigation System (VaINS) with orthophoto matching to increase robustness to GNSS failure.Normalized cross-correlation is used to match onboard camera images with geo-referenced aerial imagery.Image sequences captured at a nadir angle by VaINS on a fixed-wing UAV are used in this experiment.The integrated navigation results are compared to both a smoothed GNSS-aided reference solution and the standalone VaINS solution during simulated GNSS-denied intervals.The results demonstrate that the integrated approach significantly outperforms the VaINS-only method.This is a preliminary investigation within ongoing work in orthophoto matching.