Experiments in Fast, Autonomous, GPS-Denied Quadrotor Flight
This addresses the challenge of enabling fast, robust flight for aerial robots in complex settings, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing component technologies.
The paper tackled the problem of high-speed autonomous navigation for quadrotors in unknown, GPS-denied environments, achieving flight speeds of over 18 m/s through efficient algorithms and tight system integration.
High speed navigation through unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics. It requires fast computation and tight integration of all the subsystems on the robot such that the latency in the perception-action loop is as small as possible. Aerial robots add a limitation of payload capacity, which restricts the amount of computation that can be carried onboard. This requires efficient algorithms for each component in the navigation system. In this paper, we describe our quadrotor system which is able to smoothly navigate through mixed indoor and outdoor environments and is able to fly at speeds of more than 18 m/s. We provide an overview of our system and details about the specific component technologies that enable the high speed navigation capability of our platform. We demonstrate the robustness of our system through high speed autonomous flights and navigation through a variety of obstacle rich environments.