The ETH-MAV Team in the MBZ International Robotics Challenge
This work addresses autonomous robotics for outdoor competition tasks, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific challenge.
The paper tackled developing robust outdoor micro aerial vehicle platforms with autonomous capabilities for the MBZIRC competition, achieving second place in two challenges with autonomous landing under one minute and over 90% visual servoing success for object pickups.
This article describes the hardware and software systems of the Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) platforms used by the ETH Zurich team in the 2017 Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC). The aim was to develop robust outdoor platforms with the autonomous capabilities required for the competition, by applying and integrating knowledge from various fields, including computer vision, sensor fusion, optimal control, and probabilistic robotics. This paper presents the major components and structures of the system architectures, and reports on experimental findings for the MAV-based challenges in the competition. Main highlights include securing second place both in the individual search, pick, and place task of Challenge 3 and the Grand Challenge, with autonomous landing executed in less than one minute and a visual servoing success rate of over 90% for object pickups.