Vision based MAV navigation in unknown and unstructured environments

— Within the research on Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), the field on flight control and autonomous mission execution is one of the most active. A crucial point is the localization of the vehicle, which is especially difficult in unknown, GPS-denied environments. This paper presents a novel vision based approach, where the vehicle is localized using a downward looking monocular camera. A state-of-theart visual SLAM algorithm tracks the pose of the camera, while, simultaneously, building an incremental map of the surrounding region. Based on this pose estimation a LQG/LTR based controller stabilizes the vehicle at a desired setpoint, making simple maneuvers possible like take-off, hovering, setpoint following or landing. Experimental data show that this approach efficiently controls a helicopter while navigating through an unknown and unstructured environment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work describing a micro aerial vehicle able to navigate through an unexplor...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Michael Blösch, Stephan Weiss, Davide Scaramuzza, Roland Siegwart
• Keywords: Autonomous Mission Execution, ICRA 2010, Micro Aerial Vehicle, Robotics, Vehicle