Stereo vision and laser odometry for autonomous helicopters in GPS-denied indoor environments

Achtelik, Markus; Bachrach, Abraham; He, Ruijie; Prentice, Samuel; Roy, Nicholas

doi:10.1117/12.819082

Cited by 221 publications

(143 citation statements)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

143

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Previous work on autonomous quadrocopter flight has explored lightweight laser scanners [5], RGB-D sensors [8,9] or stereo rigs [16] mounted on a quadrocopter as primary sensors. While these sensors provide absolute scale of the environment, their drawback is a limited range and large weight, size, and power consumption when compared to a monocular set-up.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scale-aware navigation of a low-cost quadrocopter with a monocular camera

Engel

Sturm

Cremers

2014

Robotics and Autonomous Systems

186

118

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present a complete solution for the visual navigation of a small-scale, low-cost quadrocopter in unknown environments. Our approach relies solely on a monocular camera as the main sensor, and therefore does not need external tracking aids such as GPS or visual markers. Costly computations are carried out on an external laptop that communicates over wireless LAN with the quadrocopter. Our approach consists of three components: a monocular SLAM system, an extended Kalman filter for data fusion, and a PID controller. In this paper, we (1) propose a simple, yet effective method to compensate for large delays in the control loop using an accurate model of the quadrocopter's flight dynamics, and (2) present a novel, closed-form method to estimate the scale of a monocular SLAM system from additional metric sensors. We extensively evaluated our system in terms of pose estimation accuracy, flight accuracy, and flight agility using an external motion capture system. Furthermore, we compared the convergence and accuracy of our scale estimation method for an ultrasound altimeter and an air pressure sensor with filtering-based approaches. The complete system is available as open-source in ROS. This software can be used directly with a low-cost, off-the-shelf Parrot AR.Drone quadrocopter, and hence serves as an ideal basis for follow-up research projects.

show abstract

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scale-aware navigation of a low-cost quadrocopter with a monocular camera

Engel

Sturm

Cremers

2014

Robotics and Autonomous Systems

186

118

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This also demonstrates the 3-D capabilities, allowing operation in environments where approaches that assume 2-D flight might fail [11]. Although the relative positioning sensor is robust to varied illumination (up to 10, 000 lux, [25]), the sensor is affected by reflections that can lead to interference when close to reflective surfaces, which is exploited for the proximity sensing.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…[9] and [10] demonstrated indoor navigation of a quadrotor, but required significant offboard processing. However, such approaches can fail in large homogeneous environments such as long corridors, or near glass [11]. Additionally, suitable laser scanners only operate in 2-D, but the robots move in 3-D, leading to failure if there are large variations in vertical environment structure [11].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Indoor navigation with a swarm of flying robots

Stirling

Roberts

Zufferey

et al. 2012

2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract-Swarms of flying robots are promising in many applications due to rapid terrain coverage. However, there are numerous challenges in realising autonomous operation in unknown indoor environments. A new autonomous flight methodology is presented using relative positioning sensors in reference to nearby static robots. The entirely decentralised approach relies solely on local sensing without requiring absolute positioning, environment maps, powerful computation or longrange communication. The swarm deploys as a robotic network facilitating navigation and goal directed flight. Initial validation tests with quadrotors demonstrated autonomous flight within a confined indoor environment, indicating that they could traverse a large network of static robots across expansive environments.

show abstract

“…One way of achieving this is with the use of laser sensors or vision systems. Advances have been made in the use of vision sensors for target tracking and obstacle avoidance or to estimate vehicle pose [3], but the traditional stereo configuration does not provide enough information nor covers the totality of the space. In order to complete the visual information, inertial sensors were added to the system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Indoor Exploration Using a μUAV and a Spherical Geometry Based Visual System

Caldeira

Seneviratne

Dias

2013

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. This research presents a new vision system that explores a spherical geometry and will be provide innovative solutions for tracking, surveillance, navigation and mapping with micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (µUAV) in unknown indoor environments. The system will be used with µUAV in indoor environment and it is composed by twenty six cameras that are arranged in order to sample different parts of the visual sphere around the µUAV. This configuration allows that some of the cameras will have overlapped field of view. This system has been designed for the purpose of recovering ego-motion and structure from multiple video images, having a distributed omnidirectional field of view. We use the spherical geometry to extend the field of view, from one single direction to a single point of perspective, but with multiple views. This manuscript will prove that spherical geometric configuration has advantages when compared to stereo cameras for the estimation of the system's own motion and consequently the estimation of shape models from each camera. The preliminary field tests presented the theoretical potential of this system and the experimental results with the images acquired by 3 cameras.

show abstract

Stereo vision and laser odometry for autonomous helicopters in GPS-denied indoor environments

Cited by 221 publications

References 21 publications

Scale-aware navigation of a low-cost quadrocopter with a monocular camera

Scale-aware navigation of a low-cost quadrocopter with a monocular camera

Indoor navigation with a swarm of flying robots

Indoor Exploration Using a μUAV and a Spherical Geometry Based Visual System

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About