Design and Autonomous Stabilization of a Ballistically Launched Multirotor
This addresses the need for deployable drones in emergency response, defense, and space exploration, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing multirotor and autonomy technologies.
The paper tackled the problem of enabling a ballistically launched multirotor to autonomously stabilize after launch in GPS-denied environments, and demonstrated successful autonomous transition from passive to vision-based active stabilization.
Aircraft that can launch ballistically and convert to autonomous, free flying drones have applications in many areas such as emergency response, defense, and space exploration, where they can gather critical situational data using onboard sensors. This paper presents a ballistically launched, autonomously stabilizing multirotor prototype (SQUID, Streamlined Quick Unfolding Investigation Drone) with an onboard sensor suite, autonomy pipeline, and passive aerodynamic stability. We demonstrate autonomous transition from passive to vision based, active stabilization, confirming the ability of the multirotor to autonomously stabilize after a ballistic launch in a GPS denied environment.