Unmanned Aerial Vehicle of BITS Pilani , Dubai Campus for the International Aerial Robotics Competition 2015

This paper describes IFOR (Intelligent Flying Object for Reconnaissance) an autonomous aerial vehicle that has been developed by BITS Pilani, Dubai Campus students. The vehicle can localize and navigate in environments independent of external navigation aids such as GPS or large stationary points of reference (e.g. walls) for SLAM algorithms. Downward-facing cameras and optical flow via Px4Flow is used to localize and stabilize the attitude (pitch, roll and yaw) and altitude of the vehicle using PID controllers. It also identifies the autonomous ground robots by the forward-facing camera and avoids obstacle ground robots by setting the area near the paths of obstacle ground robots as hazardous area.