Graz Griffins ’ Solution to the European Robotics Challenges 2014

Abstract — An important focus of current research in the field of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) is to increase the safety of their operation in general unstructured environments. An example of a real-world application is visual inspection of industry infrastructure, which can be greatly facilitated by autonomous multicopters. Currently, active research is pursued to improve real-time vision-based localization and navigation algorithms. In this context, the goal of Challenge 3 of the EuRoC 20144 Simulation Contest was a fair comparison of algorithms in a realistic setup which also respected the computational restric-tions onboard an MAV. The evaluation separated the problem of autonomous navigation into four tasks: visual-inertial local-ization, visual-inertial mapping, control and state estimation, and trajectory planning. This EuRoC challenge attracted the participation of 21 important European institutions. This pape