A Lidar-Inertial Navigation System for UAVs in GNSS-Denied Environment with Spatial Grid Structures

Featured Application: The proposed navigation system is suitable for UAV navigation in GNSS-denied environments with spatial grid structures. It can be used for the UAV inventory system of dry coal sheds in thermal power plants, the UAV detection system for anti-corrosion coating of truss structures on high-speed railway platforms, the UAV inspection system for large turbine workshops, and other similar systems. With its fast and accurate position and attitude estimation, the feature-based lidar-inertial odometer is widely used for UAV navigation in GNSS-denied environments. However, the existing algorithms cannot accurately extract the required feature points in the spatial grid structure, resulting in reduced positioning accuracy. To solve this problem, we propose a lidar-inertial navigation system based on grid and shell features in the environment. In this paper, an algorithm for extracting features of the grid and shell is proposed. The extracted features are used to complete the pose (position and orientation) calculation based on the assumption of local collinearity and coplanarity. Compared with the existing lidar navigation system in practical application scenarios, the proposed navigation system can achieve fast and accurate pose estimation of UAV in a GNSS-denied environment full of spatial grid structures.