Visual breadcrumbs for emergency return of unmanned aerial vehicles

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Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology has advanced at a rapid pace in the last decade, making automated, on-demand remote sensing and delivery a near-term reality with applications ranging from precision agriculture to emergency response operations and reconnaissance & surveillance. A key building block that is yet to be developed is a solution that enables safe beyond-line-of-sight flight, and prevents uncontrolled vehicle behavior in the event of failures such as communication and/or GPS signal loss. The main goal of this proposal is to develop a vision-based navigation solution that enables UAVs to safely return home when they lose their means of communication and localization (i.e., GPS). Vision-based navigation techniques will enable the UAV to determine its location relative to an aerial map recorded during flight or obtained prior to flight. The University of Toronto (UofT) has been developing visual route-following techniques for ground vehicles for the past decade and also gained extensive experience in control algorithm design for autonomous flight. This project will require major extensions including the adaptation of the ground-based visual navigation framework to aerial applications and the development of a vision-based flight controller that guarantees robust localization and safe landing. The project will be carried out in partnership with PrecisionHawk, an emerging world-class provider of fixed-wing UAVs located in Canada, as well as Defence Research & Development Canada (DRDC), which uses rotor-based UAVs for a variety of defence applications (e.g., surveillance of complex urban areas). This leap forwards in vision-based navigation technology will allow UofT to make core scientific advances in the area of safe, long-term autonomy of UAVs and will allow PrecisionHawk and DRDC to incorporate these advances in their future products and solutions, thereby significantly increasing the safety of UAVs and their range of applications. Moreover, safety solutions as proposed here will help to accelerate the development of a regulatory framework for the commercial use of UAVs in beyond-line-of-side applications.