Abstract
Most consumer and industrial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) rely on combining Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) with barometric and inertial sensors for outdoor operation. As a consequence, these vehicles are prone to a variety of potential navigation failures such as jamming and environmental interference. This usually limits their legal activities to locations of low population density within line-of-sight of a human pilot to reduce risk of injury and damage. Autonomous route-following methods such as Visual Teach and Repeat (VT&R) have enabled long-range navigational autonomy for ground robots without the need for reliance on external infrastructure or an accurate global position estimate. In this paper, we demonstrate the localisation component of VT&R outdoors on a fixed-wing UAV as a method of backup navigation in case of primary sensor failure. We modify the localisation engine of VT&R to work with a single downward facing camera on a UAV to enable safe navigation under the guidance of vision alone. We evaluate the method using visual data from the UAV flying a 1200 m trajectory (at altitude of 80 m) several times during a multi-day period, covering a total distance of 10.8 km using the algorithm. We examine the localisation performance for both small (single flight) and large (inter-day) temporal differences from teach to repeat. Through these experiments, we demonstrate the ability to successfully localise the aircraft on a self-taught route using vision alone without the need for additional sensing or infrastructure.
This work was supported by the NSERC Canadian Field Robotics Network (NCFRN) and a Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS) Accelerate Fellowship in partnership with PrecisionHawk Ltd.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to PrecisionHawk, MITACS, and the NCFRN for project funding, Ethier Sand and Gravel for property access to gather data, and Haowei Zhang for logistical support and data processing.
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Warren, M., Paton, M., MacTavish, K., Schoellig, A.P., Barfoot, T.D. (2018). Towards Visual Teach and Repeat for GPS-Denied Flight of a Fixed-Wing UAV. In: Hutter, M., Siegwart, R. (eds) Field and Service Robotics. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67361-5_31
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