Our project is Low-Cost UAV Celestial Positioning for GPS-Denied Environments.
Accurate positioning is critical for reliable manual and autonomous operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This task becomes significantly more challenging in GPS-denied environments, where jamming or spoofing can produce inconsistent, uncertain, or entirely unusable GPS measurements for state estimation.
Prior approaches for UAV localization have leveraged onboard, downward-facing visual perception to infer global position; however, these methods do not readily extend to nighttime operation. While celestial navigation techniques have been explored in defense contexts, existing systems are typically incompatible with small UAV form factors and often exceed the cost of the vehicle itself. In our work, we aim to produce a low-cost, lightweight positioning module for UAVs that exploits the rich feature space available through the registration of nighttime celestial features.