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Autonomous Navigation of UAV in Foliage Environment

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Abstract

This paper presents a navigation system that enables small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles to navigate autonomously using a 2D laser range finder in foliage environment without GPS. The navigation framework consists of real-time dual layer control, navigation state estimation and online path planning. In particular, the inner loop of a quadrotor is stabilized using a commercial autopilot while the outer loop control is implemented using robust perfect tracking. The navigation state estimation consists of real-time onboard motion estimation and trajectory smoothing using the GraphSLAM technique. The onboard real-time motion estimation is achieved by a Kalman filter, fusing the planar velocity measurement from matching the consecutive scans of a laser range finder and the acceleration measurement of an inertial measurement unit. The trajectory histories from the real-time autonomous navigation together with the observed features are fed into a sliding-window based pose-graph optimization framework. The online path planning module finds an obstacle-free trajectory based the local measurement of the laser range finder. The performance of the proposed navigation system is demonstrated successfully on the autonomous navigation of a small-scale UAV in foliage environment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Temasek Laboratories, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Jin Q. Cui & Xiangxu Dong

  2. NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences, Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Shupeng Lai

  3. Department of Electrical, Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Ben M. Chen

Authors
  1. Jin Q. Cui
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  2. Shupeng Lai
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  3. Xiangxu Dong
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  4. Ben M. Chen
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Correspondence to Jin Q. Cui.

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Cui, J.Q., Lai, S., Dong, X. et al. Autonomous Navigation of UAV in Foliage Environment. J Intell Robot Syst 84, 259–276 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-015-0292-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-015-0292-1

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