Robust Monocular Flight in Cluttered Outdoor Environments

Understand

Recently, there have been numerous advances in the development of biologically inspired lightweight Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs).

• While autonomous navigation is fairly straight-forward for large UAVs as expensive sensors and monitoring devices can be employed, robust methods for obstacle avoidance remains a challenging task for MAVs which operate at low altitude in cluttered unstructured environments.
• Due to payload and power constraints, it is necessary for such systems to have autonomous navigation and flight capabilities using mostly passive sensors such as cameras.
• In this paper, we describe a robust system that enables autonomous navigation of small agile quad-rotors at low altitude through natural forest environments.