Fully autonomous micro air vehicle flight and landing on a moving target using visual–inertial estimation and model‐predictive control

• Published in: Journal of field robotics 2019-01, Vol.36 (1), p.49-77
• Main Authors: Tzoumanikas, Dimos, Li, Wenbin, Grimm, Marius, Zhang, Ketao, Kovac, Mirko, Leutenegger, Stefan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: autonomous landing; Competition; Global positioning systems; GPS; Landing; micro aerial vehicles; Micro air vehicles (MAV); Military technology; model based control; Predictive control; Robotics; Visual flight; visual‐inertial estimation
• ISSN: 1556-4959; 1556-4967
• DOI: 10.1002/rob.21821

The Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) held in spring 2017 was a very successful competition well attended by teams from all over the world. One of the challenges (Challenge 1) required an aerial robot to detect, follow, and land on a moving target in a fully autonomous fashion. In this paper, we present the hardware components of the micro air vehicle (MAV) we built with off the self components alongside the designed algorithms that were developed for the purposes of the competition. We tackle the challenge of landing on a moving target by adopting a generic approach, rather than following one that is tailored to the MBZIRC Challenge 1 setup, enabling easy adaptation to a wider range of applications and targets, even indoors, since we do not rely on availability of global positioning system. We evaluate our system in an uncontrolled outdoor environment where our MAV successfully and consistently lands on a target moving at a speed of up to 5.0 m/s.