Visual-Inertial Navigation for a Camera-Equipped 25 g Nano-Quadrotor

Abstract — We present a 25 g nano-quadrotor equipped with a micro PAL-camera and wireless video transmitter, with which we demonstrate autonomous hovering and figure flying using a visual-inertial SLAM system running on a ground-based laptop. To our knowledge this is the lightest quadrotor capable of visual-inertial navigation with off-board processing. Further we show autonomous flight with external pose-estimation, using both a motion capture system or an RGB-D camera. The hardware is low-cost, robust, easily accessible and has freely available detailed specifications. We release all code in the form of an open-source ROS package to stimulate and facilitate further research into using nano-quadrotors as visual-inertial based autonomous platforms. I