Entry Date:
November 24, 2008

Micro-Air Vehicle Navigation and Control

Principal Investigator Nicholas Roy


The group has developed some of the first fully autonomous micro-aerial vehicle (MAV) systems capable of self-directed exploration in both GPS-Denied and communications-denied environments. The absence of GPS and high-bandwidth communications links limits the sensing and processing available to the MAV to only that which can be carried onboard the vehicle.

An example (see here for video) of our past work includes a fixed wing vehicle capable of localizing itself in a known map and flying autonomously using only a 2D laser scanner and inertial measurement unit (IMU), with all processing performed onboard the vehicle.

Recent work (STAR, MLM) has focused on using small, inexpensive cameras to estimate the pose of the MAV and the geometric structure of the environment to enable high-speed autonomous flight.