Toward 30-gram Autonomous Indoor Aircraft: Vision-based Obstacle Avoidance and Altitude Control

We aim at developing autonomous micro-flyers capable of navigating within houses or small built environments. The severe weight and energy constraints of indoor flying platforms led us to take inspiration from flying insects for the selection of sensors, signal processing, and behaviors. This paper presents the control strategies enabling obstacle avoidance and altitude control using only optic flow and gyroscopic information. For experimental convenience, the control strategies are first implemented and tested separately on a small wheeled robot featuring the same hardware as the targeted aircraft. The obstacle avoidance system is then transferred to a 30-gram aircraft, which demonstrates autonomous steering within a square textured arena.