Quadrotor Obstacle Detection and Avoidance System Using a Monocular Camera

The ability to detect and avoid obstacles is a fundamental characteristic in autonomous aerial vehicles systems. Most conventional methods to detect obstacles using a combination of multiples sensors and cameras, but a quadrotor has the great limitation of the payload that can carry so the number of sensors onboard are extremely limited. To cope with this problem, this paper presents a novel obstacle detection method based on salient object detection and rasterization image using only a single camera built-in a cheap quadrotor. The video of the quadrotor camera is sent to the ground station via wireless connection, where a salient map is generated using a histogram backprojection algorithm, this map is divided into Nx x Ny squares, finally calculating and comparing the intensity of each square with a threshold, we can detect and located a possible obstacle. We demonstrate and evaluate successfully the proposed method with a parrot quadrotor, navigate it through different scenarios. Good performance on the experiments supports the proposed method, it can detect obstacles without any preprocessing data