Detecting and avoiding frontal obstacles from monocular camera for micro unmanned aerial vehicles

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for autonomous obstacle detection and avoidance in micro UAVs using monocular camera optical flow, enabling safe flight in varied environments despite optical flow limitations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach leveraging optical flow for obstacle detection in UAVs, addressing challenges like lighting and aperture issues.

Findings

UAV can fly at 1 m/s while avoiding frontal obstacles

Optical flow-based detection works in diverse lighting conditions

Method effective at altitudes of 1 to 4 meters

Abstract

In literature, several approaches are trying to make the UAVs fly autonomously i.e., by extracting perspective cues such as straight lines. However, it is only available in well-defined human made environments, in addition to many other cues which require enough texture information. Our main target is to detect and avoid frontal obstacles from a monocular camera using a quad rotor Ar.Drone 2 by exploiting optical flow as a motion parallax, the drone is permitted to fly at a speed of 1 m/s and an altitude ranging from 1 to 4 meters above the ground level. In general, detecting and avoiding frontal obstacle is a quite challenging problem because optical flow has some limitation which should be taken into account i.e. lighting conditions and aperture problem.