Tightly-coupled monocular visual-inertial fusion for autonomous flight of rotorcraft MAVs

There have been increasing interests in the robotics community in building smaller and more agile autonomous micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). In particular, the monocular visual-inertial system (VINS) that consists of only a camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) forms a great minimum sensor suite due to its superior size, weight, and power (SWaP) characteristics. In this paper, we present a tightly-coupled nonlinear optimization-based monocular VINS estimator for autonomous rotorcraft MAVs. Our estimator allows the MAV to execute trajectories at 2 m/s with roll and pitch angles up to 30 degrees. We present extensive statistical analysis to verify the performance of our approach in different environments with varying flight speeds.