A vision-guided autonomous quadrotor in an air-ground multi-robot system

Author

Li, Wei ; Zhang, Tianguang ; Kühnlenz, Kolja

Author_Institution

Inst. of Imaging & Comput. Vision, RWTH Aachen Univ., Aachen, Germany

fYear

2011

fDate

9-13 May 2011

Firstpage

2980

Lastpage

2985

Abstract

In this paper, a vision-guided autonomous quadrotor in an air-ground multi-robot system has been proposed. This quadrotor is equipped with a monocular camera, IMUs and a flight computer, which enables autonomous flights. Two complementary pose/motion estimation methods, respectively marker-based and optical-flow-based, are developed by considering different altitudes in a flight. To achieve smooth take-off, stable tracking and safe landing with respect to a moving ground robot and desired trajectories, appropriate controllers are designed. Additionally, data synchronization and time delay compensation are applied to improve the system performance. Real-time experiments are conducted in both indoor and outdoor environments.

Keywords

aerospace robotics; aircraft computers; aircraft landing guidance; automatic guided vehicles; cameras; control system synthesis; delays; mobile robots; motion estimation; multi-robot systems; pose estimation; robot vision; synchronisation; IMU; air-ground multirobot system; autonomous flight; data synchronization; flight computer; monocular camera; motion estimation method; moving ground robot; pose estimation method; safe landing; time delay compensation; tracking; vision guided autonomous quadrotor; Acceleration; Cameras; Estimation; Motion estimation; Optical imaging; Robots; Silicon;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2011 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Shanghai

ISSN

1050-4729

Print_ISBN

978-1-61284-386-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICRA.2011.5979579

Filename

5979579