Detecting and avoiding frontal obstacles from monocular camera for micro unmanned aerial vehicles

ROBOTICS PROJECT B31XP Detecting and avoiding frontal obstacles from monocular camera for micro unmanned aerial vehicles WakaWaka Group Supervisor: Yvan Petillot Team Members: H.Kidane, I.Sadek, M.Elawady Heriot Watt University School of Electrical and Physical SciencesThere exists a lot of work in the literature trying to make the UAVs fly autonomously for example extracting perspective cues such as straight lines. However, it is only available in well-defined human made environments, in addition to many other cues which require enough texture information. Our main target is to detect and avoid frontal obstacles from a monocular camera using a quad rotor Ar.Drone 2 by exploiting optical flow as a motion parallax, the drone is permitted to fly at a speed of 1 m/s and an altitude ranging from 1 to 4 meters above the ground level. In general, detecting and avoiding frontal obstacle is a quite challenging problem because optical flow has some limitation which should be taken into account i.e. lighting conditions and aperture problem