On-Board Dual-Stereo-Vision for the Navigation of an Autonomous MAV

We present a quadrotor Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) equipped with four cameras, which are arranged in two stereo configurations. The MAV is able to perform stereo matching for each camera pair on-board and in real-time, using an efficient sparse stereo method. In case of the camera pair that is facing forward, the stereo matching results are used for a reduced stereo SLAM system. The other camera pair, which is facing downwards, is used for ground plane detection and tracking. Hence, we are able to obtain a full 6DoF pose estimate from each camera pair, which we fuse with inertial measurements in an extended Kalman filter. Special care is taken to compensate various drift errors. In an evaluation we show that using two instead of one camera pair significantly increases the pose estimation accuracy and robustness.