SLAM-based return to take-off point for UAS

Bender D, Koch W, Cremers D (2018)

Publication Type: Conference contribution

Publication year: 2018

Journal

Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering Springer Verlag

Publisher: Springer Verlag

Book Volume: 501

Pages Range: 168-185

Conference Proceedings Title: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering

Event location: Daegu, KOR

ISBN: 9783319905082

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-90509-9_10

Abstract

Up to the present day, GPS signals are the key component in almost all outdoor navigation tasks of robotic platforms. To obtain the platform pose, comprising the position as well as the orientation, and receive information at a higher frequency, the GPS signals are commonly used in a GPS-corrected inertial navigation system (INS). However, the GPS is a critical single point of failure for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). We propose an approach which creates a metric map of the overflown area by fusing camera images with inertial and GPS data during normal UAS operation and use this map to steer the system efficiently to its home position in the case of an GPS outage. A naive approach would follow the previously traveled path and get accurate pose estimates by comparing the current camera image with the previously created map. The presented procedure allows the usage of shortcuts through unexplored areas to minimize the travel distance. Thereby, we ensure to reach the starting point by taking into consideration the maximal positional drift while performing pure visual navigation in unknown areas. We achieved close to optimal results in intensive numerical studies and demonstrate the usage of the algorithm in a realistic simulation environment and the real-world.

Involved external institutions

Fraunhofer-Institut für Kommunikation, Informationsverarbeitung und Ergonomie (FKIE) / Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics DE Germany (DE) Technische Universität München (TUM) DE Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Bender, D., Koch, W., & Cremers, D. (2018). SLAM-based return to take-off point for UAS. In Hanseok Ko, Sukhan Lee, Songhwai Oh (Eds.), Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering (pp. 168-185). Daegu, KOR: Springer Verlag.

MLA:

Bender, Daniel, Wolfgang Koch, and Daniel Cremers. "SLAM-based return to take-off point for UAS." Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Integration and Fusion, IEEE MFI 2017, Daegu, KOR Ed. Hanseok Ko, Sukhan Lee, Songhwai Oh, Springer Verlag, 2018. 168-185.

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