Autonomous indoor navigation of low-cost quadcopters

Many researchers from academia and industry are investigating closely how to control an autonomous mobile robot, especially Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). This paper shows the ability of a low-cost quadcopter, "Parrot AR-Drone 2.0", to navigate a predetermined route. The path is obtained by optimized path planning algorithm. A generic Simulated Annealing (SA) optimization algorithm is implemented to generate the obstacle-free path. This path is divided into several waypoints, which are navigated by the drone in various experiments. The position and orientation of the quadcopter are estimated with the incremental motion estimation approach using Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), which is mounted on the drone. The quadcopter is controlled via Simulink model with PID, which manipulates the drone internal controller for the pitch, roll, yaw and vertical speed. Four different experiments were tested to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and the obtained results indicate the high performance of the quadcopter and its applicability in various navigation applications.