Kinematic positioning using a robotic total station as applied to small-scale UAVs

Abstract

Modern robotic total stations (RTS) have the ability to automatically aim, search and track moving targets at high precision thereby enabling kinematic positioning. However, the internal subsystems of the RTS (distance and direction) exhibit time delays which limit the precision positioning of a moving target. These effects are investigated with tracking experiments on a known circular and linear path. A second part of this research investigates small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) which use navigation quality GPS as a priori coordinates for photogrammetric processing of acquired images. RTS kinematic positioning was applied to a UAV in a field trial to improve a priori image coordinates and evaluate the method for direct geo-referencing.

Keywords:

• kinematic positioning
• UAV
• robotic total station
• potentiometer

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Lynton Surveys for extensive use of their instruments during this research. Also the authors acknowledge the work of the reviewers of this paper.

Notes

1. Given that this project was designed to track a UAV, a custom-built 360⁰ mini-prism was fabricated which included an extra glass prism pointing down to enable target tracking from underneath the UAV (Figure 3).