Vision Assisted Navigation for Miniature Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (MAVs)

摘要

One of the primary difficulties in flying airplanes of all sizes is navigation, or ensuring that the location and attitude of the airplane is known at all times. For large aerial systems, high-quality IMUs have been successfully used for decades. However, the weight, power, cost, and size restrictions of miniature-UAVs (MAVs) preclude the use of high-quality IMUs for navigation. For the past two and a half years, this contract has enabled the investigation of techniques for enabling high-quality navigation using a combination of low quality inertial sensors, visual sensors, and (when available) GPS. Specific areas of contribution from this project include: (1) real-time techniques for improving pose estimates on MAVs with GPS, (2) two proposed approaches for enabling GPS-denied navigation, (3) quantitative and analytical analyses of different navigation algorithms, and (4) GPS-denied navigation utilizing multiple agents. The contributions in each of these areas is discussed in this report.