Monocular Vision SLAM-Based UAV Autonomous Landing in Emergencies and Unknown Environments

• Published in: Electronics (Basel) Vol. 7; no. 5; p. 73
• Main Authors: Yang, Tao, Li, Peiqi, Zhang, Huiming, Li, Jing, Li, Zhi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 15.05.2018
• Subjects: Aircraft landing; Drone aircraft; Drones; Emergencies; Global positioning systems; GPS; Image segmentation; Military applications; Monocular vision; Object recognition; Optical equipment; Route planning; Satellite navigation systems; Simultaneous localization and mapping; Technology assessment; Unknown environments; Unmanned aerial vehicles
• ISSN: 2079-9292; 2079-9292
• DOI: 10.3390/electronics7050073

With the popularization and wide application of drones in military and civilian fields, the safety of drones must be considered. At present, the failure and drop rates of drones are still much higher than those of manned aircraft. Therefore, it is imperative to improve the research on the safe landing and recovery of drones. However, most drone navigation methods rely on global positioning system (GPS) signals. When GPS signals are missing, these drones cannot land or recover properly. In fact, with the help of optical equipment and image recognition technology, the position and posture of the drone in three dimensions can be obtained, and the environment where the drone is located can be perceived. This paper proposes and implements a monocular vision-based drone autonomous landing system in emergencies and in unstructured environments. In this system, a novel map representation approach is proposed that combines three-dimensional features and a mid-pass filter to remove noise and construct a grid map with different heights. In addition, a region segmentation is presented to detect the edges of different-height grid areas for the sake of improving the speed and accuracy of the subsequent landing area selection. As a visual landing technology, this paper evaluates the proposed algorithm in two tasks: scene reconstruction integrity and landing location security. In these tasks, firstly, a drone scans the scene and acquires key frames in the monocular visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system in order to estimate the pose of the drone and to create a three-dimensional point cloud map. Then, the filtered three-dimensional point cloud map is converted into a grid map. The grid map is further divided into different regions to select the appropriate landing zone. Thus, it can carry out autonomous route planning. Finally, when it stops upon the landing field, it will start the descent mode near the landing area. Experiments in multiple sets of real scenes show that the environmental awareness and the landing area selection have high robustness and real-time performance.