Markerless visual control of a quad-rotor micro aerial vehicle by means of on-board stereo processing

Abstract

We present a quad-rotor micro aerial vehicle (MAV) that is capable to fly and navigate autonomously in an unknown environment. The only sensory input used by the MAV are the imagery from two cameras in a stereo configuration, and data from an inertial measurement unit. We apply a fast sparse stereo matching algorithm in combination with a visual odometry method based on PTAM to estimate the current MAV pose, which we require for autonomous control. All processing is performed on a single board computer on-board the MAV. To our knowledge, this is the first MAV that uses stereo vision for navigation, and does not rely on visual markers or off-board processing. In a flight experiment, the MAV was capable to hover autonomously, and it was able to estimate its current position at a rate of 29 Hz and with an average error of only 2.8 cm. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.