Public Summary Month 12/2012

The main work done within the last pariod (October-November) to the extension of   the teleoperation framework to the scenario of wall-following.  The UAV should be operated laterally along a wall with constant distance and orientation to it at a constant altitude.  In this scheme, the movement along the wall is controlled in open-loop by the human operator by directly setting the tilting angle in direction along the wall. By the end of November, the algorithms for laser-based wall following were still under development.

Parallel to the implementation, we were also exploring the question what a minimum sensor set could look like to enable wall-following using a UAV.  We restricted ourselves to use the accelerometer and gyroscope output from an IMU and visual information from a camera. Based on theoretical considerations, we designed an observer that takes as input only the inertial measurements from the IMU and the optical flow from a camera to obtain the metric distance to the wall as well as the metric velocity along the wall.