A MAV Platform for Indoors and Outdoors Autonomous Navigation in GPS-denied Environments

Abstract

As Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) technology becomes mature and more capable, its use for automating risky and repetitive tasks has been explored, even in challenging environments. This has resulted in a wide array of expensive platforms specialized for solving specific problems that sometimes do not generalize to other applications. In this work we develop a MAV system, UTAINS, capable of navigating in GPS-denied environments for indoors and outdoors applications. The main design target for the platform is autonomous aerial inspections of power plants, so we first introduce a survey about flying robots for inspection and exploration tasks in GPS-denied environments, presenting the proposed systems in terms of their autonomy level. Furthermore, we present the design of a modular low-cost system that can easily scale for a wide range of applications, both from a software and a hardware perspective. The software architecture is subdivided in modules that implement the key competences for autonomous navigation: motion control, perception, localization, and planning. We show the successful implementation of a design aimed for power plants inspection in GPS-denied environments through real flights following a planned trajectory, both in indoors and outdoors scenarios.