Autonomous Flight using a Smartphone as On-Board Processing Unit in GPS-Denied Environments

Abstract

In this paper, we present a low-weight and low-cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for autonomous flight and navigation in GPS-denied environments using an off-the-shelf smartphone as its core on-board processing unit. Thereby, our approach is independent from additional ground hardware and the UAV core unit can be easily replaced with more powerful hardware that simplifies setup updates as well as maintenance. The UAV is able to map, locate and navigate in an unknown indoor environment fusing vision based tracking with inertial and attitude measurements. We choose an algorithmic approach for mapping and localization that does not require GPS coverage of the target area, therefore autonomous indoor navigation is made possible. We demonstrate the UAVs capabilities of mapping, localization and navigation in an unknown 2D marker environment. Our promising results enable future research on 3D self-localization and dense mapping using mobile hardware as the only on-board processing unit.