Autonomous Flight in Unknown GNSS-denied Environments for Disaster Examination
This addresses the challenge of autonomous information gathering in search and rescue operations where manual control is error-prone and GPS is unavailable, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing autonomous navigation methods for specific conditions.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling autonomous flight for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) in unknown, GNSS-denied environments, such as disaster scenarios, and demonstrates a system that allows safe autonomous flights, including transitions between indoor and outdoor areas, evaluated in multiple search and rescue scenarios.
Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) have high potential for information gathering tasks to support situation awareness in search and rescue scenarios. Manually controlling MAVs in such scenarios requires experienced pilots and is error-prone, especially in stressful situations of real emergencies. The conditions of disaster scenarios are also challenging for autonomous MAV systems. The environment is usually not known in advance and GNSS might not always be available. We present a system for autonomous MAV flights in unknown environments which does not rely on global positioning systems. The method is evaluated in multiple search and rescue scenarios and allows for safe autonomous flights, even when transitioning between indoor and outdoor areas.