On the design and development of attitude stabilization, vision-based navigation, and aerial gripping for a low-cost quadrotor

This paper presents the design and development of autonomous attitude stabilization, navigation in unstructured, GPS-denied environments, aggressive landing on inclined surfaces, and aerial gripping using onboard sensors on a low-cost, custom-built quadrotor. The development of a multi-functional micro air vehicle (MAV) that utilizes inexpensive off-the-shelf components presents multiple challenges due to noise and sensor accuracy, and there are control challenges involved with achieving various capabilities beyond navigation. This paper addresses these issues by developing a complete system from the ground up, addressing the attitude stabilization problem using extensive filtering and an attitude estimation filter recently developed in the literature. Navigation in both indoor and outdoor environments is achieved using a visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm that relies on an onboard monocular camera. The system utilizes nested controllers for attitude stabilization, vision-based navigation, and guidance, with the navigation controller implemented using a nonlinear controller based on the sigmoid function. The efficacy of the approach is demonstrated by maintaining a stable hover even in the presence of wind gusts and when manually hitting and pulling on the quadrotor. Precision landing on inclined surfaces is demonstrated as an example of an aggressive maneuver, and is performed using only onboard sensing. Aerial gripping is accomplished with the addition of a secondary camera, capable of detecting infrared light sources, which is used to estimate the 3D location of an object, while an under-actuated and passively compliant manipulator is designed for effective gripping under uncertainty.The quadrotor is therefore able to autonomously navigate inside and outside, in the presence of disturbances, and perform tasks such as aggressively landing on inclined surfaces and locating and grasping an object, using only inexpensive, onboard sensors.

[1]  G LoweDavid,et al.  Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints , 2004 .

[2]  Claire J. Tomlin,et al.  Quadrotor Helicopter Flight Dynamics and Control: Theory and Experiment , 2007 .

[3]  Aaron M. Dollar,et al.  Hovering Stability of Helicopters With Elastic Constraints , 2010 .

[4]  Eric Feron,et al.  Experiments with small helicopter automated landings at unusual attitudes , 2007, ArXiv.

[5]  Steven Lake Waslander,et al.  Aerodynamics and control of autonomous quadrotor helicopters in aggressive maneuvering , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[6]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Cooperative manipulation and transportation with aerial robots , 2009, Auton. Robots.

[7]  Rick E. Cory,et al.  Supermaneuverable perching , 2010 .

[8]  David W. Murray,et al.  Improving the Agility of Keyframe-Based SLAM , 2008, ECCV.

[9]  J.-Y. Bouguet,et al.  Pyramidal implementation of the lucas kanade feature tracker , 1999 .

[10]  R. Lozano,et al.  Stabilization and location of a four rotor helicopter applying vision , 2006, 2006 American Control Conference.

[11]  Hauke Strasdat,et al.  Real-time monocular SLAM: Why filter? , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[12]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Full control of a quadrotor , 2007, 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[13]  Kyoung Kwan Ahn,et al.  Nonlinear PID control to improve the control performance of the pneumatic artificial muscle manipulator using neural network , 2005 .

[14]  Lorenzo Marconi,et al.  Modeling and control of VTOL UAVs interacting with the environment , 2008, 2008 47th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[15]  Robert Mahony,et al.  Modelling and control of a large quadrotor robot , 2010 .

[16]  Mark R. Cutkosky,et al.  Landing, perching and taking off from vertical surfaces , 2011, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[17]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Vision based MAV navigation in unknown and unstructured environments , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[18]  G. Gerhart,et al.  Stereo vision and laser odometry for autonomous helicopters in GPS-denied indoor environments , 2009 .

[19]  A.M. Dollar,et al.  A robust compliant grasper via shape deposition manufacturing , 2006, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.

[20]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  PID vs LQ control techniques applied to an indoor micro quadrotor , 2004, 2004 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37566).

[21]  Arun K. Somani,et al.  Monocular vision SLAM for indoor aerial vehicles , 2009, 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[22]  Rogelio Lozano,et al.  Real-Time Stabilization of an Eight-Rotor UAV Using Optical Flow , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[23]  Manolis I. A. Lourakis,et al.  SBA: A software package for generic sparse bundle adjustment , 2009, TOMS.

[24]  Robert E. Mahony,et al.  Image-Based Visual Servo Control of the Translation Kinematics of a Quadrotor Aerial Vehicle , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[25]  Rogelio Lozano,et al.  An adaptive vision-based autopilot for mini flying machines guidance, navigation and control , 2009, Auton. Robots.

[26]  Nicholas Roy,et al.  Planning in information space for a quadrotor helicopter in a GPS-denied environment , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[27]  Jacqueline M. Moore.  A system for landing an autonomous radio controlled helicopter on sloped terrain , 1994 .

[28]  Gerd Hirzinger,et al.  Energy-efficient Autonomous Four-rotor Flying Robot Controlled at 1 kHz , 2007, Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[29]  T. Hamel,et al.  A practical Visual Servo Control for a Unmanned Aerial Vehicle , 2008, Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[30]  Takeo Kanade,et al.  Vision-Based Autonomous Helicopter Research at Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute 1991-1997 , 1998 .

[31]  Glenn P. Tournier,et al.  Estimation and Control of a Quadrotor Vehicle Using Monocular Vision and Moire Patterns , 2006 .

[32]  Aaron M. Dollar,et al.  Grasping from the air: Hovering capture and load stability , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[33]  Jonathan P. How,et al.  Indoor Multi-Vehicle Flight Testbed for Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery , 2006 .

[34]  Aaron M. Dollar,et al.  Aerial Grasping from a Helicopter UAV Platform , 2010, ISER.

[35]  Ashutosh Saxena,et al.  Autonomous indoor helicopter flight using a single onboard camera , 2009, 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[36]  Olivier Stasse,et al.  MonoSLAM: Real-Time Single Camera SLAM , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[37]  P. Castillo,et al.  Stabilization of a mini rotorcraft with four rotors , 2005, IEEE Control Systems.

[38]  Jan Mayer,et al.  A numerical evaluation of preprocessing and ILU-type preconditioners for the solution of unsymmetric sparse linear systems using iterative methods , 2009, TOMS.

[39]  Kaustubh Pathak,et al.  Approaches for a tether-guided landing of an autonomous helicopter , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[40]  Joseph L. Moore,et al.  Powerline perching with a fixed-wing UAV , 2009 .

[41]  V. Moreau,et al.  Dynamic modeling and intuitive control strategy for an "X4-flyer" , 2005, 2005 International Conference on Control and Automation.

[42]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Trajectory generation and control for precise aggressive maneuvers with quadrotors , 2012, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[43]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Towards a navigation system for autonomous indoor flying , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[44]  Robert E. Mahony,et al.  Nonlinear Complementary Filters on the Special Orthogonal Group , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[45]  G. Klein,et al.  Parallel Tracking and Mapping for Small AR Workspaces , 2007, 2007 6th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality.

[46]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Construction of Cubic Structures with Quadrotor Teams , 2011, Robotics: Science and Systems.

[47]  Patrick Doherty,et al.  Vision-based pose estimation for autonomous indoor navigation of micro-scale Unmanned Aircraft Systems , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[48]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  FastSLAM 2.0: an improved particle filtering algorithm for simultaneous localization and mapping that provably converges , 2003, IJCAI 2003.

[49]  Camillo J. Taylor,et al.  Control of a Quadrotor Helicopter Using Dual Camera Visual Feedback , 2005, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[50]  Dah-Jye Lee,et al.  Vision Aided Stabilization and the Development of a Quad-Rotor Micro UAV , 2007, 2007 International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation.

[51]  Paul Y. Oh,et al.  Development of Autonomous Cargo Transport for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Using Visual Servoing , 2008 .