Autonomous Flight in Unknown Indoor Environments

Autonomous Flight in Unstructured and Unknown Indoor Environments

This paper presents our solution for enabling a quadrotor helicopter, equipped with a laser rangefinder sensor, to autonomously explore and map unstructured and unknown indoor environments. While these capabilities are already commodities on ground vehicles, air vehicles seeking the same performance face unique challenges. In this paper, we describe the difficulties in achieving fully autonomou...

Targeted Autonomous Indoor Flight of a Rotary-Wing MAV

The paper is focused on the development of algorithms for Autonomous Rotary-Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (RW MAVs) in indoor GPS-denied environments. In such missions, GPS may be unavailable and the map of the environment is a priory unknown. This paper presents a modular system consisted of the required components for flying RW MAVs in indoor environments. These components include the methods fo...

Quadrotor Using Minimal Sensing For Autonomous Indoor Flight

This paper presents a Miniature Aerial Vehicle (MAV) capable of handsoff autonomous operation within indoor environments. Our prototype is a Quadrotor weighing approximately 600g, with a diameter of 550mm, which carries the necessary electronics for stability control, altitude control, collision avoidance and anti-drift control. This MAV is equipped with three rate gyroscopes, three acceleromet...

Vistas and Wall-Floor Intersection Features: Enabling Autonomous Flight in Man-made Environments

We propose a solution toward the problem of autonomous flight and exploration in man-made indoor environments with a micro aerial vehicle (MAV), using a frontal camera, a downward-facing sonar, and an IMU. We present a general method to detect and steer an MAV toward distant features that we call vistas while building a map of the environment to detect unexplored regions. Our method enables aut...

Effective Method for Autonomous Simultaneous Localization and Map Building in Unknown Indoor Environments