Full autonomous navigation for an aerial robot using behavior-based control motion and SLAM

This work presents a complete navigation architecture for an autonomous aerial robot. The proposed scheme consist of: i) a low-level controller for establishing the attitude and position of the vehicle, ii) a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system, based in bearing (angular) measurements, which gives the robot the ability for navigating in unknown environments, and iii) a high-level motion control system which generates online trajectories. The high-level motion control system (MCS), which represents the main contribution of this work, is inspired by the behavior-based control strategies. The MCS takes as input a very high level mission target (e.g. “explore as much as you can”) and generates online trajectories according to the mission, but at the same time minimizing uncertainty in the estimations in order to maintain the integrity of the robot. The proposed architecture is explained for simplified 3DOF dynamics, but it could be extended in a straightforward manner in order to be applied to full dynamics. Several simulations are included in order to show the performance of the proposed scheme.