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Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings Yes
Title Aggressive quadrotor flight through narrow gaps with onboard sensing and computing using active vision
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Davide Falanga
  • Elias Müggler
  • Matthias Fässler
  • Davide Scaramuzza
Presentation Type paper
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
ISBN 978-1-5090-4633-1
Page Range 1 - 8
Event Title IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2017.
Event Type conference
Event Location Singapore
Event Start Date May 29 - 2017
Event End Date June 3 - 2017
Place of Publication IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2017.
Publisher IEEE
Abstract Text We address one of the main challenges towards autonomous quadrotor flight in complex environments, which is flight through narrow gaps. While previous works relied on off-board localization systems or on accurate prior knowledge of the gap position and orientation in the world reference frame, we rely solely on onboard sensing and computing and estimate the full state by fusing gap detection from a single onboard camera with an IMU. This problem is challenging for two reasons: (i) the quadrotor pose uncertainty with respect to the gap increases quadratically with the distance from the gap; (ii) the quadrotor has to actively control its orientation towards the gap to enable state estimation (i.e., active vision). We solve this problem by generating a trajectory that considers geometric, dynamic, and perception constraints: during the approach maneuver, the quadrotor always faces the gap to allow state estimation, while respecting the vehicle dynamics; during the traverse through the gap, the distance of the quadrotor to the edges of the gap is maximized. Furthermore, we replan the trajectory during its execution to cope with the varying uncertainty of the state estimate. We successfully evaluate and demonstrate the proposed approach in many real experiments, achieving a success rate of 80% and gap orientations up to 45 degrees. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses and achieves autonomous, aggressive flight through narrow gaps using only onboard sensing and computing and without prior knowledge of the pose of the gap.
Free access at DOI
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/icra.2017.7989679
Other Identification Number merlin-id:15096
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