Monocular‐SLAM–based navigation for autonomous micro helicopters in GPS‐denied environments

Autonomous micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) will soon play a major role in tasks such as search and rescue, environment monitoring, surveillance, and inspection. They allow us to easily access environments to which no humans or other vehicles can get access. This reduces the risk for both the people and the environment. For the above applications, it is, however, a requirement that the vehicle is able to navigate without using GPS, or without relying on a preexisting map, or without specific assumptions about the environment. This will allow operations in unstructured, unknown, and GPS‐denied environments. We present a novel solution for the task of autonomous navigation of a micro helicopter through a completely unknown environment by using solely a single camera and inertial sensors onboard. Many existing solutions suffer from the problem of drift in the xy plane or from the dependency on a clean GPS signal. The novelty in the here‐presented approach is to use a monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) framework to stabilize the vehicle in six degrees of freedom. This way, we overcome the problem of both the drift and the GPS dependency. The pose estimated by the visual SLAM algorithm is used in a linear optimal controller that allows us to perform all basic maneuvers such as hovering, set point and trajectory following, vertical takeoff, and landing. All calculations including SLAM and controller are running in real time and online while the helicopter is flying. No offline processing or preprocessing is done. We show real experiments that demonstrate that the vehicle can fly autonomously in an unknown and unstructured environment. To the best of our knowledge, the here‐presented work describes the first aerial vehicle that uses onboard monocular vision as a main sensor to navigate through an unknown GPS‐denied environment and independently of any external artificial aids. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.