During the last years, unmanned aerial systems (UAS) market has gained great attention. They have matured rapidly, and are expected to experience a large growth, including the civilian sector.
In the short term, UAS are expected to be widely used for multiple civil applications such as: agriculture, citizen safety, mobility, smart cities, sustainable resources management, low-carbon energy infrastructure planning and protection, disaster management and climate action including natural catastrophe.
For the civil UAS market, an affordable but still reliable system to provide attitude and position estimations is required.
In order to cope with this need, GLAD provides a low-cost attitude determination and navigation system, providing attitude and position, whose core is based on the attitude determination thanks to the computation of the low-level data coming from a multi-antenna GNSS system, making use of low-cost GNSS receivers and advanced data fusion with IMU and barometer data to enhance the attitude and position outputs in harsh GNSS environments.
Moreover, the GLAD system avoids the use of magnetometers, making it immune to magnetic fields, and avoiding the need for IMU calibration when the magnetic environment is modified.
With the completion of all activities originally planned, and the achievement of all the milestones defined at the beginning of the project (including the achievement of the CE Mark after an industrial certification process) the objective of consolidating GLAD as a marketable product aiming to cover the aforementioned needs has been accomplished.
