Visual-inertial SLAM for a small helicopter in large outdoor environments

Date

2012

Authors

Achtelik, Markus W.
Lynen, Simon
Weiss, Stephan
Kneip, Laurent
Chli, Margarita
Siegwart, Roland

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

IEEE Robotics and Automation Society

Abstract

In this video, we present our latest results towards fully autonomous flights with a small helicopter. Using a monocular camera as the only exteroceptive sensor, we fuse inertial measurements to achieve a self-calibrating power-on-and-go system, able to perform autonomous flights in previously unknown, large, outdoor spaces. Our framework achieves Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) with previously unseen robustness in onboard aerial navigation for small platforms with natural restrictions on weight and computational power. We demonstrate successful operation in flights with altitude between 0.2-70 m, trajectories with 350 m length, as well as dynamic maneuvers with track speed of 2 m/s. All flights shown are performed autonomously using vision in the loop, with only high-level waypoints given as directions.

Description

Keywords

Keywords: Aerial navigation; Autonomous flight; Computational power; Dynamic maneuvers; Exteroceptive sensor; Inertial measurements; Monocular cameras; Outdoor environment; Outdoor space; Self-calibrating; Simultaneous localization and mapping; Track speed; Waypoin

Citation

Source

Type

Conference paper

Book Title

Entity type

Access Statement

License Rights

Restricted until

2037-12-31