On the Design and Use of a Micro Air Vehicle to Track and Avoid Adversaries

The MAV '08 competition focused on the problem of using air and ground vehicles to locate and rescue hostages being held in a remote building. To execute this mission, a number of technical challenges were addressed, including designing the micro air vehicle (MAV), using the MAV to geo-locate ground targets, and planning the motion of ground vehicles to reach the hostage location without detection. In this paper, we describe the complete system designed for the MAV '08 competition, and present our solutions to three technical challenges that were addressed within this system. First, we summarize the design of our micro air vehicle, focusing on the navigation and sensing payload. Second, we describe the vision and state estimation algorithms used to track ground features, including stationary obstacles and moving adversaries, from a sequence of images collected by the MAV. Third, we describe the planning algorithm used to generate motion plans for the ground vehicles to approa...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IJRR
• Authors: Ruijie He, Abraham Bachrach, Michael Achtelik, Alborz Geramifard, Daniel Gurdan, Samuel Prentice, Jan Stumpf, Nicholas Roy
• Keywords: IJRR 2010, Micro Air Vehicle, Technical Challenges, Vehicles