드론 자율비행 기술 동향

Survey on Developing Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles

As sensors such as Inertial Measurement Unit, cameras, and Light Detection and Rangings have become cheaper and smaller, research has been actively conducted to implement functions automating micro aerial vehicles such as multirotor type drones. This would fully enable the autonomous flight of drones in the real world without human intervention. In this article, we present a survey of state-of-the-art development on autonomous drones. To build an autonomous drone, the essential components can be classified into pose estimation, environmental perception, and obstacle-free trajectory generation. To describe the trend, we selected three leading research groups—University of Pennsylvania, ETH Zurich, and Carnegie Mellon University—which have demonstrated impressive experiment results on automating drones using their estimation, perception, and trajectory generation techniques. For each group, we summarize the core of their algorithm and describe how they implemented those in such small-sized drones. Finally, we present our up to date research status on developing an autonomous drone.