ATTENTION: This is a web archive! The IMS Group was split up in 2018 and does not exist anymore. Recent work of former members can be found at the VR/AR Group and the Computer Vision Group.

Interactive Media Systems, TU Wien

Autonomous Flight using a Smartphone as On-Board Processing Unit in GPS-Denied Environments

By Michael Leichtfried, Christoph Kaltenriner, Annette Mossel, and Hannes Kaufmann

Abstract

In this paper, we present a low-weight and low-cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for autonomous flight and navigation in GPS-denied environments using an off the shelf smartphone as its core on-board processing unit. Thereby, our approach is independent from additional ground hardware and the UAV core unit can be easily replaced with more powerful hardware that simpli es setup updates as well as maintenance. The UAV is able to map, locate and navigate in an unknown indoor environment fusing vision based tracking with inertial and attitude measurements. We choose an algorithmic approach for mapping and localization that does not require GPS coverage of the target area, therefore autonomous indoor navigation is made possible. We demonstrate the UAVs capabilities of mapping, localization and navigation in an unknown 2D marker environment. Our promising results enable future research on 3D self-localization and dense mapping using mobile hardware as the only on-board processing unit.

Reference

M. Leichtfried, C. Kaltenriner, A. Mossel, H. Kaufmann: "Autonomous Flight using a Smartphone as On-Board Processing Unit in GPS-Denied Environments"; Talk: 11th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing & Multimedia (MoMM), Vienna, Austria; 12-02-2013 - 12-04-2013; in: "Proceedings of 11th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing & Multimedia (MoMM)", ACM New York, NY, USA, (2013), ISBN: 978-1-4503-2106-8; 341 - 350.

BibTeX

Click into the text area and press Ctrl+A/Ctrl+C or ⌘+A/⌘+C to copy the BibTeX into your clipboard… or download the BibTeX.