A Multirotor System For Autonomous Exploration Using Lidar

This paper describes the hardware components and the embedded software of a custom designed UAS to fulill the task of an autonomous indoor as well as outdoor exploration. The paper is structured as follows. Two SLAM algorithms are presented to cope with both in- and outdoor scenarios. The indoor solution features an 2D Hector SLAM while the outdoor solution utilizes an 3D ICP SLAM realized with a rotating LIDAR sensor. The first part deals with the development, selection and collocation of the appropriate hardware to obtain a reliable and robust system which suits the task of controlling the UAS, collecting information about the environment and providing the computational resources to execute the implemented algorithms. The next part describes the software architecture that gathers appropriate environment information for localization and executes the control commands for the UAS in an indoor environment. Subsequently the evaluation of the localization and the path following will be shown. Finally the methods for localization and mapping in an outdoor environment will be described.