Autonomous UAV Navigation using Millimeter Wave Radar

We present the design, implementation and evaluation of MilliNavigator, an autonomous navigation system for drones capable of mapping, path-planning, self-localizing, and navigating in indoor environments by leveraging strategically-placed millimeter wave anchors. Autonomous drones are an increasingly relevant tool for completing and automating hard-to-reach tasks. State of the art navigation systems rely primarily on cameras and GPS for environmental perception and self-localization. These solutions can impose restrictions on existing systems, which limit their navigable environment to well-lit, outdoors, and unobstructed paths. This thesis presents MilliNavigator, the first system to use millimeter wave radar and anchor-aware path planning to achieve high accuracy, 6DOF, online localization. By generating a localization precision score map from known anchor deployments, the system jointly optimizes travel distance and localization performance. We implemented and evaluated MilliNavigator on a drone built with commercial, off-the-shelf parts. We ran over 165 successful missions across 7 different tag deployments. Our system successfully achieved 7.9cm overall median error and had a 90th percentile error of less than 21cm.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Herrera, Joshua I.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Adib, Fadel

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/157188

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/157188