Against GPS: VIO-WareDrones

Drones have been verified as the camera of 2024 due to the enormous exponential growth in terms of the
relevant technologies and applications such as smart agriculture, transportation, inspection, logistics,
surveillance and interaction. Therefore, the commercial solutions to deploy drones in different working places
have become a crucial demand for companies. Warehouses are one of the most promising industrial domains
to utilize drones to automate different operations such as inventory scanning, goods transportation to the
delivery lines, area monitoring on demand and so on. On the other hands, deploying drones (or even mobile
robots) in such challenging environment needs to enable accurate state estimation in terms of position and
orientation to allow autonomous navigation. This is because GPS signals are not available in warehouses due
to the obstruction by the closed-sky areas and the signal deflection by structures.
Vision-based positioning systems are the most promising techniques to achieve reliable position estimation in
indoor environments. This is because of using low-cost sensors (cameras), the utilization of dense
environmental features and the possibilities to operate in indoor/outdoor areas. Therefore, this proposal aims
to address a crucial question for industrial applications with our industrial partners to explore limitations and
develop solutions towards robust state estimation of drones in challenging environments such as warehouses
and greenhouses. The results of this project will be used as the baseline to develop other navigation
technologies towards full autonomous deployment of drones such as mapping, localization, docking and
maneuvering to safely deploy drones in GPS-denied areas.