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A General Purpose Configurable Controller for Indoors and Outdoors GPS-Denied Navigation for Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

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Abstract

This research on odometry based GPS-denied navigation on multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is focused among the interactions between the odometry sensors and the navigation controller. More precisely, we present a controller architecture that allows to specify a speed specified flight envelope where the quality of the odometry measurements is guaranteed. The controller utilizes a simple point mass kinematic model, described by a set of configurable parameters, to generate a complying speed plan. For experimental testing, we have used down-facing camera optical-flow as odometry measurement. This work is a continuation of prior research to outdoors environments using an AR Drone 2.0 vehicle, as it provides reliable optical flow on a wide range of flying conditions and floor textures. Our experiments show that the architecture is realiable for outdoors flight on altitudes lower than 9 m. A prior version of our code was utilized to compete in the International Micro Air Vehicle Conference and Flight Competition IMAV 2012. The code will be released as an open-source ROS stack hosted on GitHub.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centro de Automática y Robótica, CSIC-UPM, Madrid, Spain

    Jesús Pestana, Ignacio Mellado-Bataller, Jose Luis Sanchez-Lopez, Changhong Fu & Pascual Campoy

  2. Centro Tecnológico de Automatización Industrial, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Carrera 7 No 40-69, 110311, Bogotá, DC, Colombia

    Iván F. Mondragón

Authors
  1. Jesús Pestana
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  2. Ignacio Mellado-Bataller
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  3. Jose Luis Sanchez-Lopez
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  4. Changhong Fu
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  5. Iván F. Mondragón
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  6. Pascual Campoy
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Correspondence to Jesús Pestana.

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Pestana, J., Mellado-Bataller, I., Sanchez-Lopez, J.L. et al. A General Purpose Configurable Controller for Indoors and Outdoors GPS-Denied Navigation for Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. J Intell Robot Syst 73, 387–400 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-013-9953-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-013-9953-0

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