Increasing the reliability of drones due to the use of quaternions in motion

The article suggests a positioning system structure for a small unmanned aerial vehicle (SUAV), which performs a short-term flight autonomously. Special attention is paid to LibrePilot autopilot structure and the variant of connecting external systems to it, which allows performing autonomous flight without operator intervention, based on the obtained data. The implementation of the built-in inertial navigation system in conjunction with a GPS receiver, a video camera and the OpenCV library for image recognition is investigated for solving orientation problems and autonomous control of SUAV. In addition, the ability of Kalman filter, which is built into the LibrePilot controller, is analysed, as well as the performance of the computing system based on the received data from gyroscopes.