Visually Guided Balloon Popping with an Autonomous MAV at MBZIRC 2020

Marius Beul, Simon Bultmann, Andre Rochow, Radu Alexandru Rosu, Daniel Schleich, Malte Splietker, Sven Behnke

Abstract: Visually guided control of micro aerial vehicles (MAV) demands for robust real-time perception, fast trajectory generation, and a capable flight platform. We present a fully autonomous MAV that is able to pop balloons, relying only on onboard sensing and computing. The system is evaluated with real robot experiments during the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2020 where it showed its resilience and speed. In all three competition runs we were able to pop all five balloons in less than two minutes flight time with a single MAV.