Reliable state estimation of an unmanned aerial vehicle over a distributed wireless IoT network

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted a lot of attention due to their enormous potentiality in civil and military applications over the past years. In order to allow accurate control action of UAV, a robust and real-time state estimation technique is required. In this paper, we propose a Kalman filter based UAV state estimation technique when the communication takes place over wireless links in an Internet of Things (IoT) network. We consider that a set of sensors observes the state of the UAV and transmits the observation to a control center (central server) over a distributed wireless IoT network. To deal with the communication impairments due to wireless communication links between the UAV's sensors and the IoT system components, e.g., IoT gateways, a Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem coded communication system is presented. Based on the received signals at the IoT gateways, a global state estimation technique is proposed. Performance of the proposed communication and estimation scheme is demonstrated through numerical results for different conditions. From the comparison with a conventional estimation scheme, it is observed that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the conventional scheme in terms of state estimation and error performance.