DROAN - Disparity-Space Representation for Obstacle Avoidance: Enabling Wire Mapping & Avoidance

Wire detection, depth estimation and avoidance is one of the hardest challenges towards the ubiquitous presence of robust autonomous aerial vehicles. We present an approach and a system which tackles these three challenges along with generic obstacle avoidance as well. First, we perform monocular wire detection using a convolutional neural network under the semantic segmentation paradigm, and obtain a confidence map of wire pixels. Along with this, we also use a binocular stereo pair to detect other generic obstacles. We represent wires and generic obstacles using a disparity space representation and do a C-space expansion by using a non-linear sensor model we develop. Occupancy inference for collision checking is performed by maintaining a pose graph over multiple disparity images. For avoidance of wire and generic obstacles, we use a precomputed trajectory library, which is evaluated in an online fashion in accordance to a cost function over proximity to the goal. We follow this trajectory with a path tracking controller. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in simulation for wire mapping, and on hardware by multiple runs for both wire and generic obstacle avoidance.