A New Visual and Inertial and Satellite Integrated Navigation Method Based on Point Cloud Registration

The three navigation methods of vision, inertia and satellite have obvious complementarity in navigation accuracy, positioning method and anti-interference ability. In this paper we propose a combined visual/inertial/satellite navigation method, which can be used in both outdoors where satellites are available and indoors where satellites are unavailable where continuous geolocation can be achieved in those scenarios. First, when Global Positioning System (GPS) works normally, the absolute geographic positioning results provided by GPS are combined with the relative positioning results obtained by visual-inertial combination to obtain the coordinate conversion between the visual-inertial combined navigation reference coordinate system (world coordinate system) and the geographic coordinate system. When the GPS is interfered or the signal is lost, the relative positioning result obtained by the visual-inertial combination is converted into the geographic coordinate system by using the rotation and translation matrix and the scale factor between the world coordinate system and the geographic coordinate system, so that the result is obtained in the geographic coordinate system. Finally, this paper uses the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) as the experimental platform to verify the method. The experimental results show that absolute geolocation results can still be obtained by using the corrected visual-inertial integrated navigation method when GPS is not available, which provides a new approach for global navigation of platforms such as UAV and Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV).