Accurate Vision-based Flight with Fixed-Wing Drones

Fixed-wing drones must navigate to the desired location accurately for maneuvers such as picking up objects and perching. However, current GNSS receivers limit their navigation accuracy to several meters in outdoor environments, making such maneuvers impossible. RTK GNSS can improve flight accuracy, but it requires ground stations at the target location and additional communication modules on the drone. Here, we describe a fixed-wing platform with onboard computation that uses positional information from a GNSS receiver and vision from an onboard camera. The drone relies on a GNSS signal for flying towards a point of interest and switches to vision-based information to accurately reach the target. We conducted outdoor experiments to compare the flight accuracy of three navigation methods: GNSS, RTK GNSS, and the proposed GNSS-vision method. We also systematically assessed the robustness of vision-based control to compensate for GNSS errors and quantify the accuracy of the proposed method. Our results show that the accuracy of the proposed GNSS-vision system is on par with RTK GNSS. GNSS-vision reduces the average error of GNSS by over an order of magnitude, from 3.033 m to 0.283 m, and reduces the variance across repeated flights from 2.095 m to 0.309 m. We open-source the software-hardware architecture used in this paper to enable the research community to build on these results and expand the capabilities of fixed-wing drones.