Onboard IMU and monocular vision based control for MAVs in unknown in- and outdoor environments

Abstract

In this paper, we present our latest achievements towards the goal of autonomous flights of an MAV in unknown environments, only having a monocular camera as exteroceptive sensor. As MAVs are highly agile, it is not sufficient to directly use the visual input for position control at the framerates that can be achieved with small onboard computers. Our contributions in this work are twofold. First, we present a solution to overcome the issue of having a low frequent onboard visual pose update versus the high agility of an MAV. This is solved by filtering visual information with inputs from inertial sensors. Second, as our system is based on monocular vision, we present a solution to estimate the metric visual scale aid of an air pressure sensor. All computation is running onboard and is tightly integrated on the MAV to avoid jitter and latencies. This framework enables stable flights indoors and outdoors even under windy conditions.