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There's No Place Like Home: Visual Teach and Repeat for Emergency Return of Multirotor UAVs During GPS Failure

M. Warren,Melissa Greeff,Bhavit Patel,J. Collier,Angela P. Schoellig,T. Barfoot

Published 2018 in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

ABSTRACT

Redundant navigation systems are critical for safe operation of UAVs in high-risk environments. Since most commercial UAVs almost wholly rely on GPS, jamming, interference, and multi-pathing are real concerns that usually limit their operations to low-risk environments and visual line-of-sight. This letter presents a vision-based route-following system for the autonomous, safe return of UAVs under primary navigation failure such as GPS jamming. Using a Visual Teach and Repeat framework to build a visual map of the environment during an outbound flight, we show the autonomous return of the UAV by visually localizing the live view to this map when a simulated GPS failure occurs, controlling the vehicle to follow the safe outbound path back to the launch point. Using gimbal-stabilized stereo vision and inertial sensing alone, without reliance on external infrastructure, Visual Odometry and localization are achieved at altitudes of 5–25 m and flight speeds up to 55 km/h. We examine the performance of the visual localization algorithm under a variety of conditions and also demonstrate closed-loop autonomy along a complicated 450 m path.

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