Autonomous UAV Navigation using Millimeter Wave
Radar
Name
herrera-jih-meng-eecs-2024-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
Size
2.33 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d0fecb794e27023d0284c7507b168f2e
Author(s)
Herrera, Joshua I.
Advisor(s)
Adib, Fadel
Date Issued
September 2024
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
We present the design, implementation and evaluation of MilliNavigator, an autonomous navigation system for drones capable of mapping, path-planning, self-localizing, and navigating in indoor environments by leveraging strategically-placed millimeter wave anchors. Autonomous drones are an increasingly relevant tool for completing and automating hard-to-reach tasks. State of the art navigation systems rely primarily on cameras and GPS for environmental perception and self-localization. These solutions can impose restrictions on existing systems, which limit their navigable environment to well-lit, outdoors, and unobstructed paths. This thesis presents MilliNavigator, the first system to use millimeter wave radar and anchor-aware path planning to achieve high accuracy, 6DOF, online localization. By generating a localization precision score map from known anchor deployments, the system jointly optimizes travel distance and localization performance. We implemented and evaluated MilliNavigator on a drone built with commercial, off-the-shelf parts. We ran over 165 successful missions across 7 different tag deployments. Our system successfully achieved 7.9cm overall median error and had a 90th percentile error of less than 21cm.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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