Safe Local Exploration for Replanning in Cluttered Unknown Environments for Micro-Aerial Vehicles

In order to enable Micro-Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) to assist in complex, unknown, unstructured environments, they must be able to navigate with guaranteed safety, even when faced with a cluttered environment they have no prior knowledge of. While trajectory optimization-based local planners have been shown to perform well in these cases, prior work either does not address how to deal with local minima in the optimization problem, or solves it by using an optimistic global planner. We present a conservative trajectory optimization-based local planner, coupled with a local exploration strategy that selects intermediate goals. We perform extensive simulations to show that this system performs better than the standard approach of using an optimistic global planner, and also outperforms doing a single exploration step when the local planner is stuck. The method is validated through experiments in a variety of highly cluttered environments including a dense forest. These experiments show the complete system running in real time fully onboard an MAV, mapping and replanning at 4 Hz.Comment: Accepted to ICRA 2018 and RA-L 201

Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for Multi-Micro Aerial Vehicle Robust Collision Avoidance

Multiple multirotor Micro Aerial Vehicles sharing the same airspace require a reliable and robust collision avoidance technique. In this paper we address the problem of multi-MAV reactive collision avoidance. A model-based controller is employed to achieve simultaneously reference trajectory tracking and collision avoidance. Moreover, we also account for the uncertainty of the state estimator and the other agents position and velocity uncertainties to achieve a higher degree of robustness. The proposed approach is decentralized, does not require collision-free reference trajectory and accounts for the full MAV dynamics. We validated our approach in simulation and experimentally.Comment: Video available on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot76i9p2ZZo&t=40

Aerial-Ground collaborative sensing: Third-Person view for teleoperation

Rapid deployment and operation are key requirements in time critical application, such as Search and Rescue (SaR). Efficiently teleoperated ground robots can support first-responders in such situations. However, first-person view teleoperation is sub-optimal in difficult terrains, while a third-person perspective can drastically increase teleoperation performance. Here, we propose a Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV)-based system that can autonomously provide third-person perspective to ground robots. While our approach is based on local visual servoing, it further leverages the global localization of several ground robots to seamlessly transfer between these ground robots in GPS-denied environments. Therewith one MAV can support multiple ground robots on a demand basis. Furthermore, our system enables different visual detection regimes, and enhanced operability, and return-home functionality. We evaluate our system in real-world SaR scenarios.Comment: Accepted for publication in 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics (SSRR