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.