Onboard flight control of a micro quadrotor using single strapdown optical flow sensor

Abstract

This paper considers autonomous onboard hovering flight control of a micro quadrotor using a strapdown optical flow sensor which is conventionally used for desktop mice. The vehicle considered in this paper can carry only a few dozen grams of payload, therefore conventional camera-based optical flow methods are not applicable. We present autonomous hovering flight control of the micro quadrotor using a single-chip optical flow sensor, implemented on an 8-bit microprocessor without external positioning sensors. Detailed description of all the system components is provided along with evaluation of the accuracy. Experimental results from flight tests are validated with the ground-truth data provided by a high-accuracy motion capture system.