Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have great potentials to be applied for indoor search and rescue missions. In this paper, we propose a modular lightweight design of an autonomous MAV with integrated hardware and software. The MAV is equipped with the 2D laser scanner, camera, mission computer and flight controller, running all the computation onboard in real time. The onboard perception system includes a laser-based SLAM module and a custom-designed visual detection module. A dual Kalman filter design provides robust state estimation by multiple sensor fusion. Specifically, the fusion module provides robust altitude measurement in the circumstance of surface changing. In addition, indoor-outdoor transition is explicitly handled by the fusion module. In order to efficiently navigate through obstacles and adapt to multiple tasks, a task tree-based mission planning method is seamlessly integrated with path planning and control modules. The MAV is capable of searching and rescuing victims from unknown indoor environments effectively. It was validated by our award-winning performance at the 2017 International Micro Air Vehicle Competition (IMAV 2017), held in Toulouse, France. The performance video is available on https://youtu.be/8H19ppS_VXM.
Unmanned aerial systems provide many applications with the ability to perform flying tasks autonomously, and hence have received significant research and commercial attention in the past decade. One of the most popular unmanned aerial platforms for such tasks is the small-scale rotorcraft with multiple rotors, commonly known as multicopters. In order for these platforms to perform fully autonomous missions and tasks, they require a sophisticated low-level flight control system that is integrated with advanced task and motion planning modules, which combine together to form the complete unmanned aerial system (UAS). In this paper, the planning module of unmanned multicopter systems is discussed in detail, and a comprehensive survey on techniques for both motion and task planning reported in literature and by the Unmanned Systems Research Group at the National University of Singapore is presented.
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