A 3 points vision based approach for MAV localization in GPS denied environments

This paper introduces a new method to localize a micro aerial vehicle (MAV) in GPS denied environments and without the usage of any known pattern. The method exploits the planar ground assumption and only uses the data provided by a monocular camera and an inertial measurement unit. It is based on a closed solution which provides the vehicle pose from a single camera image, once the roll and the pitch angles are obtained by the inertial measurements. Specifically, the vehicle position and attitude can uniquely be determined by having two point features. However, the precision is significantly improved by using three point features. The closed form solution makes the method very simple in terms of computational cost and therefore very suitable for real time implementation. Additionally, because of this closed solution, the method does not need any initialization. Results of experimentation show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.