Visual-Aided Inertial Navigation for Computationally Constrained Aerial Vehicles

Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) are lightweight, highly dynamic vehicles with limited payload, sensing, and computation capabilities. There is significant interest to automate MAVs for military surveillance, reconnaissance, and search-and-rescue missions. The current state of the art in MAV control utilizes an external system of cameras or other sensors to localize the vehicle during flight. Precise MAV localization using onboard computing and sensing resources is required for missions in unknown indoor and outdoor environments. In general MAVs may only operate using a low-performance inertial measurement unit and a single camera, with use of other sensors such as GPS or altimeters being limited by payload or environmental constraints.