Designing hardware and software systems toward very compact and fully autonomous quadrotors

In this paper, we describe the design and performance of hardware and software systems toward very compact and fully autonomous quadrotors, where they can complete rescue or surveillance missions without external assistance systems like ground station computers, high-performance wireless communication devices or motion capture system. In the experiments, we assess the performance of on-board image processing with a monocular camera while the vehicle is hovering. And we also describe the vision necessary for on-board applications in the real environment including automatic hovering and self-position estimation with a map using low-end hardware system.