"Small Flying Robots - Design and Visual Navigation"

This presentation will focus on the design and visual navigation of UAVs in the kilogram range and below. Scaling, design and performance issues will be presented and discussed in the context of our small helicopters, lighter-than-air vehicle and solar-powered fixed wing airplanes. A novel unifying Kalman filter framework for motion and position estimation will be presented and feature based visual navigation will be discussed. Real world experiments of vision motion estimation and vSLAM (visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) will be presented.

These technologies find their applications for search and rescuing in GPS denied environments, surveillance through long-duration flights and flying inspection tasks.