Challenges Of Autonomous Flight In Indoor Environments

Indoor navigation has been a major focus of drone research over the last few decades. The main reason for the term "indoor" came from the fact that in outdoor environments, drones could rely on global navigation systems such as GPS for their position and velocity estimates. By focusing on unknown indoor environments, the research had to focus on solutions using onboard sensors and processing. In this article, we present an overview of the state of the art and remaining challenges in this area, with a focus on small drones.