Positioning and obstacle detection for quadrotor helicopters

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Small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) can be used in a varietyof applications for which low-cost aerial inspection, surveillance or photographyare beneficial. Examples include real-estate photography, wildlife monitoring, forest fire detection, pipeline and hydro line inspection, and crowd monitoring. Government, militaryand commercial customers continue to find new uses and ask for greater ease of use and higher reliabiltyin the platforms currentlyavailable.One such platform, the Aeryon Scout quadrotor vehicle, has been developed byAeryon Labs Inc. of Waterloo, ON. To answer the call of their customers, we propose to improve the autonomous capabilities of the 1.2 kg vehicle in the following three areas: outdoor positioning, indoor positioning and obstacle avoidance. Ineach case, the goal is to advance the current state of the art for quadrotor vehicles and improve the reliability of the platform, extending the range of applications for which the vehicle can be considered and reducing the amount of training needed to safelyoperate the vehicle.The project will emphasize the use of the existing onboard sensors, including GPS, IMU and two-axis gimballed camera. Outdoors, the availabilityof GPS can be limited when operating close to buildings or undertree cover, so vision data will be used to augment position estimation and vehicle control when GPS is lost. Indoor flight cannot relyon GPS at all, and so vision based position estimation becomes critical to safe operation. Finally, obstacle detection will be developed bylooking for trackable features on segmented regionsof the current image, enabling coarse map building in real time with limited computational resources.The result will be a small UAS that can safelynavigate from point A to point B without running into obstacles. The current need for constant vigilence of the operator can be greatlyalleviated, and applications where line of sight maybe temporarilydisrupted can therefore be considered. Operators will be able to focus on higher level mission tasks, leaving position control and obstacle detection to the onboard system.