Title
Autonomous Vision-based Micro Air Vehicle for Indoor and Outdoor Navigation
Abstract
AbstractMicro air vehicles have become very popular in recent years. Autonomous navigation of such systems plays an important role in many industrial applications as well as in search-and-rescue scenarios. We present a quadrotor that performs autonomous navigation in complex indoor and outdoor environments. An operator selects target positions in the onboard map and the system autonomously plans an obstacle-free path and flies to these locations. An onboard stereo camera and inertial measurement unit are the only sensors. The system is independent of external navigation aids such as GPS. No assumptions are made about the structure of the unknown environment. All navigation tasks are implemented onboard the system. A wireless connection is only used for sending images and a three-dimensional 3D map to the operator and to receive target locations. We discuss the hardware and software setup of the system in detail. Highlights of the implementation are the field-programmable-gate-array-based dense stereo matching of 0.5 Mpixel images at a rate of 14.6 Hz using semiglobal matching, locally drift-free visual odometry with key frames, and sensor data fusion with compensation of measurement delays of 220ï ms. We show the robustness of the approach in simulations and experiments with ground truth. We present the results of a complex, autonomous indoor/outdoor flight and the exploration of a coal mine with obstacle avoidance and 3D mapping.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1002/rob.21506
Periodicals
Field
DocType
Volume
Obstacle avoidance,Stereo camera,Computer vision,Visual odometry,Simulation,Sensor fusion,Global Positioning System,Inertial measurement unit,Artificial intelligence,Engineering,Mobile robot navigation,Micro air vehicle
Journal
31
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1556-4959
25
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.33
38
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Korbinian Schmid11759.11
Philipp Lutz21285.35
Teodor Tomic31619.05
Elmar Mair429816.35
Heiko Hirschmüller582745.70