ABSTRACT
Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) offer exceptional mobility and perceptual capabilities over ground platforms, making them particularly suitable for search-and-rescue, disaster response, and inspection missions in which the vehicle must be able to navigate through complex three dimensional environments. In such missions, MAVs must be fully autonomous in order to stabilize their fast dynamics and react to changes in environmental conditions. This talk summarizes our recent advances in autonomous MAVs with focus on state estimation and trajectory control: (1) a self-calibrating multi-camera visual-inertial fusion approach with on-the-fly initialization for rapid deployment of MAVs; (2) a dense visual-inertial fusion approach for robust tracking of very aggressive motions; (3) a real-time trajectory generation approach for high-speed autonomous flight through cluttered environments; and (4) experimental testbed and system integration efforts at the HKUST UAV group. Extensive experimental results will be presented throughout the talk.