FPGA-Based Fast Response Image Analysis for Autonomous or Semi-autonomous Indoor Flight

Small aerial vehicles, like quadrotor, have a high potential to be helpful tools in first response scenarios like earthquakes, landslides and fires. But even simple tasks like holding position and altitude can be challenging to accomplish by a human operator and even more challenging autonomously. When outdoors, using GPS and pressure sensors is feasible, but indoors or in GPS denied environments it is not. Until now, for indoor flight scenarios either a lot of energy consuming sensors and hardware or a perfectly defined surrounding is required. In this approach, the viability of an onboard FPGA based indoor flight navigation system with a pan-tilt camera mount and a single VGA camera is tested. It can be used to either support an operator performing a hold position and altitude task, or act completely autonomously to achieve this task.