Feature-rich path planning for robust navigation of MAVs with Mono-SLAM

Abstract

We present a path planning method for MAVs with vision-only MonoSLAM that generates safe paths to a goal according to the information richness of the environment. The planner runs on top of monocular SLAM and uses the available information about structure of the environment and features visibility to find trajectories that maintain visual contact with feature-rich areas. The MAV continuously re-plans as it explores and updates the feature-points in the map. In real-world experiments we show that our system is able to avoid paths that lead into visually-poor sections of the environment by considering the distribution of visual features. If the same system ignores the availability of visually-informative regions in the planning, it is unable to estimate its state accurately and fails to reach its goal.