Visual SLAM for autonomous navigation of MAVs

This book focuses on developing onboard visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems to enable autonomous navigation of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs), which is still a challenging topic considering the limited payload and computational capability that an MAV normally has. In MAV applications, the visual SLAM systems are required to be very efficient, especially when other visual tasks have to be done in parallel. Furthermore, robustness in pose tracking is highly desired in order to enable safe autonomous navigation of an MAV in three-dimensional (3D) space. These challenges motivate the work in this book in the following four aspects. Firstly, the problem of visual pose estimation for MAVs using an artificial landmark is addressed. Secondly, autonomous landing on an arbitrarily textured landing site during autonomous navigation of an MAV is achieved. The third problem that is addressed in this thesis is multi-camera visual SLAM for robust pose tracking of MAVs.