Scalable Outdoors Autonomous Drone Flight with Visual-Inertial SLAM and Dense Submaps Built without LiDAR

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Laina, Sebastián Barbas, Boche, Simon, Papatheodorou, Sotiris, Tzoumanikas, Dimos, Schaefer, Simon, Chen, Hanzhi, Leutenegger, Stefan
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Laina, Sebastián Barbas
Boche, Simon
Papatheodorou, Sotiris
Tzoumanikas, Dimos
Schaefer, Simon
Chen, Hanzhi
Leutenegger, Stefan
author_facet Laina, Sebastián Barbas
Boche, Simon
Papatheodorou, Sotiris
Tzoumanikas, Dimos
Schaefer, Simon
Chen, Hanzhi
Leutenegger, Stefan
contents Autonomous navigation is needed for several robotics applications. In this paper we present an autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) system which purely relies on cost-effective and light-weight passive visual and inertial sensors to perform large-scale autonomous navigation in outdoor,unstructured and cluttered environments. We leverage visual-inertial simultaneous localization and mapping (VI-SLAM) for accurate MAV state estimates and couple it with a volumetric occupancy submapping system to achieve a scalable mapping framework which can be directly used for path planning. To ensure the safety of the MAV during navigation, we also propose a novel reference trajectory anchoring scheme that deforms the reference trajectory the MAV is tracking upon state updates from the VI-SLAM system in a consistent way, even upon large state updates due to loop-closures. We thoroughly validate our system in both real and simulated forest environments and at peak velocities up to 3 m/s while not encountering a single collision or system failure. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system which achieves this level of performance in such an unstructured environment using low-cost passive visual sensors and fully on-board computation, including VI-SLAM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_09596
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scalable Outdoors Autonomous Drone Flight with Visual-Inertial SLAM and Dense Submaps Built without LiDAR
Laina, Sebastián Barbas
Boche, Simon
Papatheodorou, Sotiris
Tzoumanikas, Dimos
Schaefer, Simon
Chen, Hanzhi
Leutenegger, Stefan
Robotics
Autonomous navigation is needed for several robotics applications. In this paper we present an autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) system which purely relies on cost-effective and light-weight passive visual and inertial sensors to perform large-scale autonomous navigation in outdoor,unstructured and cluttered environments. We leverage visual-inertial simultaneous localization and mapping (VI-SLAM) for accurate MAV state estimates and couple it with a volumetric occupancy submapping system to achieve a scalable mapping framework which can be directly used for path planning. To ensure the safety of the MAV during navigation, we also propose a novel reference trajectory anchoring scheme that deforms the reference trajectory the MAV is tracking upon state updates from the VI-SLAM system in a consistent way, even upon large state updates due to loop-closures. We thoroughly validate our system in both real and simulated forest environments and at peak velocities up to 3 m/s while not encountering a single collision or system failure. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system which achieves this level of performance in such an unstructured environment using low-cost passive visual sensors and fully on-board computation, including VI-SLAM.
title Scalable Outdoors Autonomous Drone Flight with Visual-Inertial SLAM and Dense Submaps Built without LiDAR
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09596