Autonomous Flight using a Smartphone as On-Board Processing Unit in GPS-Denied Environments

In this paper, we present a low-weight and low-cost UnmannedAerial Vehicle (UAV) for autonomous flight and navigation in GPS-denied environments using an off the shelfsmartphone as its core on-board processing unit. Thereby,our approach is independent from additional groundhardware and the UAV core unit can be easily replacedwith more powerful hardware that simpli es setup updatesas well as maintenance. The UAV is able to map, locateand navigate in an unknown indoor environment fusing visionbased tracking with inertial and attitude measurements.We choose an algorithmic approach for mapping and localizationthat does not require GPS coverage of the targetarea, therefore autonomous indoor navigation is made possible.We demonstrate the UAVs capabilities of mapping,localization and navigation in an unknown 2D marker environment.Our promising results enable future research on 3D self-localization and dense mapping using mobile hardwareas the only on-board processing unit.