Contact Inertial Odometry: Collisions are your Friends

Autonomous exploration of unknown environments with aerial vehicles remains a challenge, especially in perceptually degraded conditions. Dust, fog, or lack visual LiDAR-based features results severe difficulties for state estimation algorithms, which failure can be catastrophic. In this work, we show that it is indeed possible to navigate such conditions without any exteroceptive sensing by exploiting collisions instead treating them as constraints. To end, present novel contact-based inertial odometry (CIO) algorithm: uses estimated external forces the environment detect and generate pseudo-measurements robot velocity, enabling autonomous flight. fully exploit method, first perform modeling hybrid ground vehicle withstand at moderate speeds, develop an wrench algorithm. Then, our CIO algorithm reactive planner control law encourage bouncing off obstacles. All components framework are validated hardware experiments demonstrate quadrotor traverse cluttered using IMU only. This work used on drones recover from micro-drones do not have payload capacity carry cameras, LiDARs powerful computers.