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ICRA
2010
IEEE

Autonomous flight at low altitude with vision-based collision avoidance and GPS-based path following

13 years 10 months ago
Autonomous flight at low altitude with vision-based collision avoidance and GPS-based path following
The ability to fly at low altitude while actively avoiding collisions with the terrain and other objects is a great challenge for small unmanned aircraft. This paper builds on top of a control strategy called optiPilot whereby a series of opticflow detectors pointed at divergent viewing directions around the aircraft main axis are linearly combined into roll and pitch commands using two sets of weights. This control strategy already proved successful at controlling flight and avoiding collisions in reactive navigation experiments. This paper shows how opitPilot can be coupled with a GPS in order to provide goal-directed, nap-of-the-earth flight control in presence of static obstacles. Two fully autonomous flights of 25 minutes each are described where a 400-gram unmanned aircraft is flying at approx. 9 m above the terrain on a circular path including two copses of trees requiring efficient collision avoidance actions.
Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Antoine Beyeler, Dario F
Added 13 Feb 2011
Updated 13 Feb 2011
Type Journal
Year 2010
Where ICRA
Authors Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Antoine Beyeler, Dario Floreano
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