Towards Resilient UAV: Escape Time in GPS Denied Environment with Sensor Drift

Abstract: This paper considers a resilient state estimation framework for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that integrates a Kalman filter-like state estimator and an attack detector. When an attack is detected, the state estimator uses only IMU signals as the GPS signals do not contain legitimate information. This limited sensor availability induces a sensor drift problem questioning the reliability of the sensor estimates. We propose a new resilience measure, escape time, as the safe time within which the estimation errors remain in a tolerable region with high probability. This paper analyzes the stability of the proposed resilient estimation framework and quantifies a lower bound for the escape time. Moreover, simulations of the UAV model demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework and provide analytical results.