sFly: EMAV Competition, first autonomous purely vision based helicopter, 10 meters!

This video shows our participation at the European Micro Aerial Vehicle competition where we won the 2nd place and we were the only purely vision based autonomous helicopter. Besides being the only one using a single camera as sole sensor, we were also the the only autonomous helicopter among all the other participants! In this video the helicopter takes off from the circular spot, then uses Visual SLAM to build a map of the environment and navigate through via points specified by the user. Because the competition took place in a gymnasium, there was no texture on the floor and this forced us to add artificial texture. Look also when the helicopter passes through the window.. isn't it impressing? ;-) The overall length was 10 meters!

This work is described in the paper: M. Bloesch, S. Weiss, D. Scaramuzza, R. Siegwart, Vision Based MAV Navigation in Unknown and Unstructured Environments, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'10), Anchorage, USA, 2010.
that you can find at http://projects.asl.ethz.ch/sfly/doku.php?id=publications

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• camera
• helicopter
• autonomous
• robot
• flight
• sfly
• ETH Zurich
• Autonomous Systems Lab