A direct visual servoing‐based framework for the 2016 IROS Autonomous Drone Racing Challenge

This paper presents a framework for navigating in obstacle‐dense environments as posed in the 2016 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Autonomous Drone Racing Challenge. Our framework is based on direct visual servoing and leg‐by‐leg planning to navigate in a complex en...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of field robotics Vol. 35; no. 1; pp. 146 - 166
Main Authors Jung, Sunggoo, Cho, Sungwook, Lee, Dasol, Lee, Hanseob, Shim, David Hyunchul
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Hoboken Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.01.2018
Subjects
Aerial robotics
autonomous drone racing
Autonomous navigation
Barriers
Cameras
collision avoidance
Error detection
Global positioning systems
GPS
Indoor environments
Indoor navigation
Navigation
Obstacle avoidance
Optical flow (image analysis)
Position measurement
Position sensing
Racing
Satellite navigation systems
stereo vision
Velocity measurement
Visual control
visual servoing
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Summary:This paper presents a framework for navigating in obstacle‐dense environments as posed in the 2016 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Autonomous Drone Racing Challenge. Our framework is based on direct visual servoing and leg‐by‐leg planning to navigate in a complex environment filled with many similar frame‐shaped obstacles to fly through. Our indoor navigation method relies on the velocity measurement by an optical flow sensor since the position measurements from GPS or external cameras are not available. For precision navigation through a sequence of obstacles, a center point–matching method is used with the depth information from the onboard stereo camera. The guidance points is directly generated in three‐dimensional space using the two‐dimensional image data to avoid accumulating the error from the sensor drift. The proposed framework is implemented on a quadrotor‐based aerial vehicle, which carries an onboard vision‐processing computer for self‐contained operation. Using the proposed method, our drone was able to finished in first place in the world‐premier IROS Autonomous Drone Racing Challenge.
ISSN:1556-4959
1556-4967
DOI:10.1002/rob.21743