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Virginia Tech

Vision Based Localization of Drones in a GPS Denied Environment

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

In this thesis, we build a robust end-to-end pipeline for the localization of multiple drones in a GPS-denied environment. This pipeline would help us with cooperative formation control, autonomous delivery, search and rescue operations etc. To achieve this we integrate a custom trained YOLO (You Only Look Once) object detection network, for drones, with the ZED2 stereo camera system. With the help of this sensor we obtain a relative vector from the left camera to that drone. After calibrating it from the left camera to that drone's center of mass, we then estimate the location of all the drones in the leader drone's frame of reference. We do this by solving the localization problem with least squares estimation and thus acquire the location of the follower drone's in the leader drone's frame of reference. We present the results with the stereo camera system followed by simulations run in AirSim to verify the precision of our pipeline.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Science
Level thesis:degree_level
masters
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Computer Engineering
Department dc:contributor.department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2020

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Chadha, Abhimanyu
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Williams, Ryan K.
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Abbott, A. Lynn
  • Huang, Jia-Bin

Subjects

dc:subject × 3

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:27395
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/99887

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Chadha, Abhimanyu. Vision Based Localization of Drones in a GPS Denied Environment. masters thesis, Virginia Tech, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/99887