An indoor unmanned coaxial rotorcraft system with vision positioning

We present in this paper the development of an indoor micro unmanned coaxial rotorcraft system with vision processing functions. The rotorcraft can automatically position itself based on the landmarks on the ground and perform a few indoor flight tasks. A toy rotorcraft is adopted and upgraded by adding an essential avionic system, which includes an embedded computer, an inertial measurement unit, a servo controller, and a wireless modem. In addition, a wireless camera is mounted under the rotorcraft body to capture real time image streams and send them to the ground control station. After a series of image processing at the ground station, high-level control commands are sent back to the onboard avionic system. By this mean, the rotorcraft is able to follow colored tracks on the ground and perform turning when it needs to. Experiments have been carried out to verify the accuracy of vision processing outputs and flight tests have been performed to ensure an overall good performance of the rotorcraft.