Onboard Flight Control of a Small Quadrotor Using Single Strapdown Optical Flow Sensor
This enables autonomous hovering for lightweight drones where conventional camera-based methods are infeasible, though it is incremental in sensor application.
The paper tackled onboard hovering control of a small quadrotor with limited payload capacity by using a single-chip optical flow sensor, achieving flight control validated against ground-truth data.
This paper considers onboard control of a small-sized quadrotor using a strapdown embedded optical flow sensor which is conventionally used for desktop mice. The vehicle considered in this paper can carry only few dozen grams of payload, therefore conventional camera-based optical flow methods are not applicable. We present hovering control of the small-sized quadrotor using a single-chip optical flow sensor, implemented on an 8-bit microprocessor without external sensors or communication with a ground control station. Detailed description of all the system components is provided along with evaluation of the accuracy. Experimental results from flight tests are validated with the ground-truth data provided by a high-accuracy reference system.