Towards Autonomous Navigation of Miniature UAV

Roland Brockers, Martin Humenberger, Stephan Weiss, Larry H. Matthies

Abstract: Micro air vehicles such as miniature rotorcrafts require high-precision and fast localization updates for their control, but cannot carry large payloads. Therefore, only small and light-weight sensors and processing units can be deployed 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 navigation framework to provide a small quadrotor UAV with accurate state estimation for high speed control including 6DoF pose and sensor self-calibration. Our method allows very fast deployment without prior calibration procedures literally rendering the vehicle a throw-and-go platform. Additionally, we demonstrate hazard-avoiding autonomous landing to showcase a high-level navigation capability that relies on the low-level pose estimation results and is executed on the same embedded platform. We explain our hardware-specific implementation on a 12g processing unit and show real-world end-to-end results.