A Visual-Inertial Navigation System Using AprilTag for Real-Time MAV Applications

Abstract

© 2018 IEEE.Typical industrial applications, which can benefit from using Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) take place at well-controlled environments. In this case, the MAVs can rely on a fiducial system to improve their navigation based on a reliable map of the environment. In this work, we assess the use of artificial landmarks for accurate and robust visual-inertial navigation within a controlled environment. The use of artificial landmarks presents relevant advantages over techniques that assume an unknown environment. They require less processing effort and provide more robustness for dynamic and large environments. As a result, one can employ simpler, affordable platforms enabling commercially attractive applications due to cost reduction, energy efficiency, simplicity and determinism during operation. Therefore, this work presents the design and development of an accurate and efficient visual-inertial navigation system to provide feedback information allowing low and high-level control functionalities for MAV applications.

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