Autonomous Flight in Unknown GNSS-denied Environments for Disaster Examination

TL;DR

This paper presents a system enabling micro aerial vehicles to perform autonomous flights in unknown, GNSS-denied environments for disaster scenarios, enhancing search and rescue operations without relying on GPS.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel autonomous MAV system capable of operating in unknown environments without GPS, validated in various disaster-related search and rescue scenarios.

Findings

Enables safe autonomous flights in unknown environments

Operates effectively across indoor and outdoor transitions

Does not depend on global positioning systems

Abstract

Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) have high potential for information gathering tasks to support situation awareness in search and rescue scenarios. Manually controlling MAVs in such scenarios requires experienced pilots and is error-prone, especially in stressful situations of real emergencies. The conditions of disaster scenarios are also challenging for autonomous MAV systems. The environment is usually not known in advance and GNSS might not always be available. We present a system for autonomous MAV flights in unknown environments which does not rely on global positioning systems. The method is evaluated in multiple search and rescue scenarios and allows for safe autonomous flights, even when transitioning between indoor and outdoor areas.