333A System for Safe Semi-Autonomous Indoor Flight
In this project, we present an end-to-end system for semi-autonomous flight of a Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in indoor, GPS-denied, environments. In particular, our system monitors a human user controlled flight and provides override commands to avoid collision with obstacles. We build on an established model for quadrotor dynamics to implement a system of nested control loops for attitude and position control. State estimates are calculated using an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to fuse onboard IMU acceleration and velocity measurements with Microsoft Kinect based RGBD visual odometry. A potential field based method that leverages point cloud data over a small time window is then used for obstacle avoidance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in simulation and on an Ascending Technologies Firefly testbed
Speaker Details
Joseph DeGol is a third year Computer Science PhD student at the UIUC where he is advised by Dr. Derek Hoiem and Dr. Tim Bretl. His interests include computer vision and robots; particularly in the applications of computer vision and robotics technologies for construction site monitoring and civil structure inspection. Joseph was awarded the NDSEG Graduate Fellowship and NSF GRFP Honorable Mention twice. He received a B.S. in Computer Engineering and a B.S. in Mathematics from the Pennsylvania State University and has participated in past research experiences at Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, the University of Michigan, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He also held a software engineering internship at WIPRO in Bangalore, India. His interests include running, soccer, board games, and he played NCAA Division III men’s soccer at Penn State Altoona.
- Date:
- Speakers:
- Joe DeGol
- Affiliation:
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
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Jeff Running
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