Autonomous Vision-Based Navigation of a Quadrotor in Corridor-Like Environments

Vision-based bio-inspired control strategies offer great promise in demonstrating safe autonomous navigation of aerial microsystems in completely unstructured environments. This paper presents an innovative navigation technique that embeds bio-inspired wide-field processing of instantaneous optic flow patterns within the H-infinity loop shaping synthesis framework, resulting in a dynamic controller that enables robust stabilization and command tracking behavior in obstacle-laden environments. The local environment is parameterized as a series of simpler corridor-like environments in the optic flow model, and the loop shaping controller is synthesized to provide robust stability across the range of modeled environments. Experimental validation is provided using a quadrotor aerial vehicle across environments with large variation in local structure, with the loop shaping controller demonstrating better tracking performance than other comparable controllers in straight-line corridors of different widths. The current approach is computationally efficient, as it does not involve explicit extraction of an environment depth map, and makes for an attractive paradigm for aerial microsystem navigation in urban environments.