This paper presents a single camera and laser system dedicated to the realtime estimation of attitude and altitude for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) under low illumination conditions to dark environments. The fisheye camera allows to cover a large field of view (FOV). The approach, close to structured light systems, uses the geometrical information obtained by the projection of a laser circle onto the ground plane and perceived by the camera. We propose some experiments based on simulated data and real sequences. The results show good agreement with the ground truth values from the commercial sensors in terms of its accuracy and correctness. The results also prove its suitability for autonomous take-off and landing as well as for the case of low altitude manoeuvre in dark, GPS signal deficient and environments with no prebuilt maps. It also provides room for additional payload to be used for different applications due to it being inexpensive and use of light weight micro-camera and laser system.
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