UAV Navigation With 5G Carrier Phase Measurements

A framework for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation using downlink cellular fifth-generation (5G) signals is presented. In the proposed framework, a software-defined receiver (SDR) is developed to extract carrier phase measurements from received 5G signals. The SDR utilizes the time- domain orthogonality of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based 5G signals. A so-called ultimate synchronization signal (USS) to combine all available resources is proposed. The proposed 5G SDR includes two stages: (i) acquisition stage, in which only unique USS resources are utilized to detect the hearable gNBs and (ii) tracking stage, in which the entire USS is utilized to produce 5G carrier phase measurements. These measurements are processed in an extended Kalman filter (EKF) to assess the navigation performance of the proposed 5G opportunistic SDR. Experimental results are presented of an UAV navigating with the proposed 5G SDR, while receiving signals from four 5G base stations (known as gNBs). It is shown that over a trajectory of 500 m traversed in 145 seconds, the position root mean-squared error (RMSE) was 3.35 m.