Motion estimation for autonomous quadrocopter indoor flight

Abstract

One of the basic requirements for performing an autonomous flight with a Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) is to reliably sense the motion relative to its environment. This paper presents a motion estimator for an autonomous quadrotor in indoor environments, without the need for information from an external tracking system. As main sensor a simple, low-cost optical-flow sensor chip is used. Hence, the estimator needs only few resources for post-processing and is intended to be suitable for running on a simple microcontroller.