Inertial Optical Flow for Throw-and-Go Micro Air Vehicles

In this paper, we describe a novel method using only optical flow from a single camera and inertial information to quickly initialize, deploy, and autonomously stabilize an inherently unstable aerial vehicle. Our approach requires a minimal number of tracked features in only two consecutive frames and inertial readings eliminating the need of long feature tracks or local maps and rendering it inherently failsafe. We show theoretically, in simulation, and in real experiments that we can reliably estimate and control the vehicle velocity, full attitude, and metric distance to the scene while self-calibrating inertial intrinsics and sensor extrinsics. In fact, the fast initialization, self-calibration, and inherent fail-safe property leads to the first visual-inertial throw-and-go capable system.