Autonomous Flying Robots

The usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is a fast spreading appliance in mititary and civil use cases. They are used for observation, exploration, mapping or inspection of areas, but also for border patrol, search and rescue services and for taking agricultural pictures or traffic monitoring. We are using a Quadrocopter with powerful brushless motors, radiation and accelleration sensors and a microcontroller for our research. In a first step, the quadrocopter keeps a connection to a base station to share information. The aim is to fly completely autonomously without the base station. Main parts, besides localization, of this abandonment are control of the flight, generating a map and planning a path in three dimenstions.

Quadrocopter in action

Central research questions are:

• Flight control
• Leightweight solutions
• Three-Dimensional mapping
• Three-Dimensional pathfinding
• Vision-Based selflocalization