Scaling the world of monocular SLAM with INS-measurements for UAS navigation

The usage of a global positioning system (GPS) corrected inertial navigation system (INS) seems to be advantageous to camera-based pose estimation algorithms for outdoor navigation. The GPS signals lead to a geographical location with an accuracy of a few meters or even up to some centimeters in a setup utilizing correction data. Performing the pose estimation with a camera system has several disadvantages. The high amount of data has to be processed and the robustness may vary because of different environment and weather conditions. Nevertheless, cameras are the most used sensors for various tasks with unmanned aerial systems (UAS) because of their low cost and weight. The research results for vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms show the great capabilities of vision-based navigation. Therefore, the possibilities of cameras should be investigated for outdoor navigation in conjunction with an INS or as standalone backup solution in the case of an INS failure.