Towards Autonomous Navigation of Miniature strongUAVstrong.pdfVIP

Towards autonomous navigation of miniature UAV Roland Brockers Martin Humenberger Stephan Weiss Jet Propulsion Laboratory Austrian Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory brockers@ martin.humenberger@ait.ac.at Stephan.Weiss@ Larry Matthies Jet Propulsion Laboratory lhm@ Abstract Micro air vehicles such as miniature rotorcrafts require high-precision and fast localization updates for their con- trol, but cannot carry large payloads. Therefore, only small and light-weight sensors and processing units can be de- ployed on such platforms, favoring vision-based solutions that use light weight cameras and run on small embedded computing platforms. In this paper, we propose a navi- gation framework to provide a small quadrotor UAV with accurate state estimation for high speed control including Figure 1. Asctec Hummingbird with Odroid-U2 flight computer 6DoF pose and sensor self-calibration. Our method al- mounted on top. lows very fast deployment without prior calibration proce- dures literally rendering the vehicle a throw-and-go plat- get. Consequently, only light-weight sensors and process- form. Additionally, we demonstrate hazard-avoiding au- ing units can be used on such platforms, favoring vision- tonomous landing to showcase a high-level navigation ca- based pose estimation solutions that use small light-weight pability that relies on the low-level pose estimation results cameras and MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) in- and is executed on the same embedded