PIXHAWK: A micro aerial vehicle design for autonomous flight using onboard computer vision
Meier, Lorenz ; Tanskanen, Petri ; Heng, Lionel ; Lee, Gim ; Fraundorfer, Friedrich ; Pollefeys, Marc
In: Autonomous Robots, 2012, vol. 33, no. 1-2, p. 21-39
Add to personal list- Summary
- We describe a novel quadrotor Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) system that is designed to use computer vision algorithms within the flight control loop. The main contribution is a MAV system that is able to run both the vision-based flight control and stereo-vision-based obstacle detection parallelly on an embedded computer onboard the MAV. The system design features the integration of a powerful onboard computer and the synchronization of IMU-Vision measurements by hardware timestamping which allows tight integration of IMU measurements into the computer vision pipeline. We evaluate the accuracy of marker-based visual pose estimation for flight control and demonstrate marker-based autonomous flight including obstacle detection using stereo vision. We also show the benefits of our IMU-Vision synchronization for egomotion estimation in additional experiments where we use the synchronized measurements for pose estimation using the 2pt+gravity formulation of the PnP problem