Journal Publication

J. Pestana, I. Mellado-Bataller, C. Fu, J. L. Sanchez-Lopez, I. F. Mondragon, P. Campoy. A General Purpose Configurable Controller for Indoors and Outdoors GPS-Denied Navigation for Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems. Springer Netherlands. ISSN: 0921-0296. e-ISSN: 1573-0409. vol. 73. no. 1. pp. 387-400. 1 Jan. 2014. (Online: Oct. 2013). DOI: 10.1007/s10846-013-9953-0.

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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.