A vision based aerial robot solution for the Mission 7 of the International Aerial Robotics Competition

peer reviewedThe International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) aims at pulling forward the state of the art in UAV. The Mission's 7 challenge deals mainly with GPS/Laser denied navigation, Robot-Robot interaction and obstacle avoidance in the setting of a ground robot herding problem. We present in this paper our UAV which took part in the 2014 competition, in the China venue. This year, the mission was not completed by any participant but our team at Technical University of Madrid (UPM) were awarded with two special prizes: Best Target Detection and Best System Control. The platform, hardware and the developed software used in this top leading competition are presented in this paper. This software has three main components: the visual localization and mapping algorithm; the control algorithms; and the mission planner. A statement of the safety measures integrated in the drone and of our efforts to ensure field testing in conditions as close as possible to the challenger's are also included