Autonomous Capabilities to Facilitate Indoor Exploration by UAS

Unmanned aerial systems have become common in modern life, but many rely heavily on teleoperation and external sensors, such as Global Positioning System (GPS) information. Numerous potential applications exist for indoor UAS operation, but additional advances in autonomy are required to realize these. In this work, a proven estimator and controller are modified to accept updated hardware and augmented with an adaptive controller and autonomous landing algorithm. These additional features will facilitate a larger system-of-systems to place relay-sensor devices throughout an underground facility and to perform indoor surveillance. In testing, both the adaptive controller and auto-landing algorithms performed successfully. This work ultimately demonstrates the feasibility of red, green, blue, depth cameras to provide reliable state estimates and position information to support additional autonomous behaviors for UAS in the conduct of indoor exploration.