Fully self-contained vision-aided navigation and landing of a micro air vehicle independent from external sensor inputs

Roland Brockers; Sara Susca; David Zhu; Larry Matthies

doi:10.1117/12.919278

25 May 2012 Fully self-contained vision-aided navigation and landing of a micro air vehicle independent from external sensor inputs

Roland Brockers, Sara Susca, David Zhu, Larry Matthies

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 8387, Unmanned Systems Technology XIV; 83870Q (2012) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.919278
Event: SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing, 2012, Baltimore, Maryland, United States

Abstract

Direct-lift micro air vehicles have important applications in reconnaissance. In order to conduct persistent surveillance in urban environments, it is essential that these systems can perform autonomous landing maneuvers on elevated surfaces that provide high vantage points without the help of any external sensor and with a fully contained on-board software solution. In this paper, we present a micro air vehicle that uses vision feedback from a single down looking camera to navigate autonomously and detect an elevated landing platform as a surrogate for a roof top. Our method requires no special preparation (labels or markers) of the landing location. Rather, leveraging the planar character of urban structure, the landing platform detection system uses a planar homography decomposition to detect landing targets and produce approach waypoints for autonomous landing. The vehicle control algorithm uses a Kalman filter based approach for pose estimation to fuse visual SLAM (PTAM) position estimates with IMU data to correct for high latency SLAM inputs and to increase the position estimate update rate in order to improve control stability. Scale recovery is achieved using inputs from a sonar altimeter. In experimental runs, we demonstrate a real-time implementation running on-board a micro aerial vehicle that is fully self-contained and independent from any external sensor information. With this method, the vehicle is able to search autonomously for a landing location and perform precision landing maneuvers on the detected targets.

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Roland Brockers, Sara Susca, David Zhu, and Larry Matthies "Fully self-contained vision-aided navigation and landing of a micro air vehicle independent from external sensor inputs", Proc. SPIE 8387, Unmanned Systems Technology XIV, 83870Q (25 May 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.919278

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