Sep 17, 2016 @ 21:02 |
Vijay Kumar and his team from University of Pennsylvania demonstrated an autonomous 250g drone (quadrotor) performing aggressive maneuvers.
You have seen fighter aircraft doing stunt, now small drones (weight 250 g) also can do those stunts.
Prof. Vijay Kumar and his research team from University of Pennsylvania demonstrated an autonomous 250 g drone (quadrotor) performing aggressive maneuvers using a qualcomm snapdragon flight and relying only on on-board computation and sensor capabilities. The control planning and estimation tasks are solved based on the information provided by a single camera and an IMU.
Now a day small drones are becoming very popular in lots of application areas like search and rescue operations, agriculture, item delivery, aerial survey and map building. Amazon is making drones to deliver items. During the operation sometimes aggressive maneuvers also required to navigate in cluttered environment.
Researchers demonstrated aggressive trajectories around poles and narrow window gaps at different inclinations. The drone was able to traverse narrow gaps requiring accelerations up to 1.5 g and roll and pitch angles up to 90 degrees with velocities of 5 m/s.
The current approach does not require any switching control strategy and it is fully based on the information of only a single camera and IMU. This is the first time that aggressive maneuvers are solved with such a small footprint vehicle, using only on-board sensors and without relying on external motion capture systems.
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On September 11 the video of an autonomous 250 g quadrotor was posted on youtube, where we can see it performing aggressive maneuvers.
Vijay Kumar, Giuseppe Loianno and others said “We are creating autonomous flying robots that are able to navigate in complex, three-dimensional environments with or without GPS with applications to search and rescue, first response and precision farming. The robots are quadrotors with onboard sensors and processors customized for state estimation, control and planning. They rely on a range of sensors that can include an IMU, cameras, a laser range scanner, an altimeter and a GPS sensor.”
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Keywords: quadrotor, IMU, Camera, Drone, Sensors, GPS, Laser, Aggressive maneuvers
- Image: Vijay kumar Lab