Aggressive navigation using high-speed natural feature point tracking

Presently, most autonomous aerial vehicles rely on satellite navigation such as GPS to sense their position in the earth reference frame. However, reliance on GPS restricts the vehicle to missions where GPS signals are readily received. Motion capture systems are capable of indoor localization but require large infrastructure and are prone to occlusion. To overcome these restrictions, a self-contained high-speed vision system was developed at the University of Tokyo in collaboration with Boeing Research & Technology. The system has been flight tested and shown to be capable of drift-free position and attitude estimates without any reliance on GPS signals. Furthermore, the positional accuracy and update rate is at least one order of magnitude superior to that of uncorrected GPS.
QC 20150605