Autonomous Corridor Flight of a UAV Using a Low-Cost and Light-Weight RGB-D Camera

We describe the first application of the novel Kinect RGB-D sensor on a fully autonomous quadrotor UAV. In contrast to the established RGB-D devices that are both expensive and comparably heavy, the Kinect is light-weight and especially low-cost. It provides dense color and depth information and can be readily applied to a variety of tasks in the robotics domain. We apply the Kinect on a UAV in an indoor corridor scenario. The sensor extracts a 3D point cloud of the environment that is further processed on-board to identify walls, obstacles, and the position and orientation of the UAV inside the corridor. Subsequent controllers for altitude, position, velocity, and heading enable the UAV to autonomously operate in this indoor environment.