NASA Logo

NTRS

NTRS - NASA Technical Reports Server

Back to Results
Fully Self-Contained Vision-Aided Navigation and Landing of a Micro Air Vehicle Independent from External Sensor InputsDirect-lift micro air vehicles have important applications in reconnaissance. In order to conduct persistent surveillance in urban environments, it is essential that these systems can perform autonomous landing maneuvers on elevated surfaces that provide high vantage points without the help of any external sensor and with a fully contained on-board software solution. In this paper, we present a micro air vehicle that uses vision feedback from a single down looking camera to navigate autonomously and detect an elevated landing platform as a surrogate for a roof top. Our method requires no special preparation (labels or markers) of the landing location. Rather, leveraging the planar character of urban structure, the landing platform detection system uses a planar homography decomposition to detect landing targets and produce approach waypoints for autonomous landing. The vehicle control algorithm uses a Kalman filter based approach for pose estimation to fuse visual SLAM (PTAM) position estimates with IMU data to correct for high latency SLAM inputs and to increase the position estimate update rate in order to improve control stability. Scale recovery is achieved using inputs from a sonar altimeter. In experimental runs, we demonstrate a real-time implementation running on-board a micro aerial vehicle that is fully self-contained and independent from any external sensor information. With this method, the vehicle is able to search autonomously for a landing location and perform precision landing maneuvers on the detected targets.
Document ID
20130010537
Acquisition Source
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Document Type
Conference Paper
External Source(s)
Authors
Brockers, Roland
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Susca, Sara
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Zhu, David
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Matthies, Larry
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Date Acquired
August 27, 2013
Publication Date
April 23, 2012
Subject Category
Spacecraft Design, Testing And Performance
Meeting Information
Meeting: SPIE Symposium on Defense, Security, and Sensing
Location: Baltimore, MD
Country: United States
Start Date: April 23, 2012
End Date: April 27, 2012
Sponsors: International Society for Optical Engineering
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Other
Keywords
autonomous landing
micro air vehicles (MAVs)

Available Downloads

There are no available downloads for this record.
No Preview Available