Aggressive Visual Perching with Quadrotors on Inclined Surfaces

Jeffrey Mao, Guanrui Li, Stephen Nogar, Christopher Kroninger, Giuseppe Loianno

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the potential to be employed for surveillance and monitoring tasks. By perching and staring on one or multiple locations aerial robots can save energy while concurrently increasing their overall mission time without actively flying. In this paper, we address the estimation, planning, and control problems for autonomous perching on inclined surfaces with small quadrotors using visual and inertial sensing. We focus on planning and executing dynamically feasible trajectories to navigate and perch to a desired target location with on board sensing and computation. Our planner also supports certain classes of nonlinear global constraints by leveraging an efficient algorithm that we have mathematically verified. The on board cameras and IMU are concurrently used for state estimation and to infer the relative robot/target localization. The proposed solution runs in real-time on board a limited computational unit. Experimental results validate the proposed approach by tackling aggressive perching maneuvers with flight envelopes that include large excursions from the hover position on inclined surfaces up to 90°, angular rates up to 600 deg/s, and accelerations up to 10 m/s2.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationIEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2021
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages5242-5248
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781665417143
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Event2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2021 - Prague, Czech Republic
Duration: Sep 27 2021Oct 1 2021

Publication series

NameIEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
ISSN (Print)2153-0858
ISSN (Electronic)2153-0866

Conference

Conference2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2021
Country/TerritoryCzech Republic
CityPrague
Period9/27/2110/1/21

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Software
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Science Applications

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