The challenge for unmanned aerial vehicles to sense and avoid obstacles becomes even harder if narrow passages have to be crossed. An approach to solve a mission scenario that tackles the problem of such narrow passages is presented here. The task is to fly an unmanned helicopter autonomously through a course with gates that are only slightly larger than the vehicle itself. A camera is installed on the vehicle to detect the gates. Using vehicle localization data from a navigation solution, camera alignment and global gate positions are estimated simultaneously. The presented algorithm calculates the desired target waypoints to fly through the gates. Furthermore, the paper presents a mission execution plan that instructs the vehicle to search for a gate, to fly through it after successful detection, and to search for a proceeding one. All algorithms are designed to run onboard the vehicle so that no interaction with the ground control station is necessary making the vehicle completely autonomous.
Autonomous vision-based helicopter flights through obstacle gates
Autonome videobasierte Hubschrauberflüge durch Hindernistore
2010
22 Seiten, 14 Bilder, 1 Tabelle, 23 Quellen
Conference paper
English
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