English

Abstract

In this paper, an external vision based robust pose estimation system for a quadrotor in outdoor environment has been proposed. This system can provide us with approximate ground truth of a quadrotor outdoors, while most of external vision based systems perform indoors. Here, we do not modify the architecture of the quadrotor or put colored blobs, LEDs on it. We only use the own features of the quadrotor. We implement a pure vision-based approach to get preliminary position of a flying quadrotor. Then only using the own features of the quadrotor, we present a novel robust pose estimation algorithm to get the accurate pose of a quadrotor. With good observed results, we get all the four rotors and calculate the pose. But when fewer than four rotors are observed, all of other external vision based systems of the quadrotor did not mention this and can not get right pose results. In this paper, we have solved this problem and got accurate pose estimation with IMU data. This system can provide us with approximate ground truth outdoors. We demonstrate in real experiments that the vision-based pose estimation system for outdoor environment can perform accurately and robustly in real time.