Onboard Flight Control of a Drone under GPS-denied Environment using LIDAR

Abstract

In order to realize automatic investigation of MAVs in indoor environment, an independent navigation method which does not use exterior system such as the satellite navigation system is required. Such a method is called “SLAM”, and the authors are now focusing on applying it to MAVs. Hector SLAM was applied as the basic SLAM algorithm and it was fused with IMU by EKF. The brief concept of SLAM algorithm and implementation of EKF are introduced. An MAV equipped with a LIDAR, an IMU and a PC was used for 2 flight experiments where first one was at non-ordered environment and second one was at well-ordered environment, which is more preferable for the SLAM algorithm. Motion capture system was used to evaluate the navigation performance. Both experiments succeeded to automatically flight control the MAV by the proposed navigation method in real-time. Second flight showed more stable response and accurate navigation compared with first flight. This implies that the environment configuration will affect the SLAM navigation accuracy.