Vision-Based State Estimation and Trajectory Control Towards High-Speed Flight with a Quadrotor

This paper addresses the development of a light-weight autonomous quadrotor that uses cameras and an inexpensive IMU as its only sensors and onboard processors for estimation and control. We describe a fully-functional, integrated system with a focus on robust visual-inertial state estimation, and demonstrate the quadrotor’s ability to autonomously travel at speeds up to 4 m/s and roll and pitch angles exceeding 20 degrees. The performance of the proposed system is demonstrated via challenging experiments in three dimensional indoor environments.