Vision-Based Odometry and SLAM for Medium and High Altitude Flying UAVs

This paper proposes vision-based techniques for localizing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) by means of an on-board camera. Only natural landmarks provided by a feature tracking algorithm will be considered, without the help of visual beacons or landmarks with known positions. First, it is described a monocular visual odometer which could be used as a backup system when the accuracy of GPS is reduced to critical levels. Homography-based techniques are used to compute the UAV relative translation and rotation by means of the images gathered by an onboard camera. The analysis of the problem takes into account the stochastic nature of the estimation and practical implementation issues. The visual odometer is then integrated into a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) scheme in order to reduce the impact of cumulative errors in odometry-based position estimation This work is partially supported by the AWARE project (IST-2006-33579) funded by the European Commission, and the AEROSENS project (DPI-2005-02293) funded by the Spanish Government. F. Caballero (B) · J. Ferruz · A. Ollero University of Seville, Seville, Spain e-mail: [email protected] J. Ferruz e-mail: [email protected] A. Ollero e-mail: [email protected] L. Merino Pablo de Olavide University, Seville, Spain e-mail: [email protected]