Monocular trail detection and tracking aided by visual SLAM for small unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

This article addresses the navigation problem of small and medium-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) built to perform missions in forest environments (e.g., search and rescue) by exploiting the presence of natural or man-made paths, typically present in this type of environments. The proposed system extends a previous monocular-based technique for trail detection and tracking so as to take into account volumetric data acquired from a Visual SLAM algorithm and, as a result, to increase its sturdiness upon challenging trails. The experimental results, obtained via a set of 12 videos recorded with a camera installed in a tele-operated, unmanned small-sized aerial vehicle, show the ability of the proposed system to overcome some of the difficulties of the original detector, attaining a success rate of 97.8%.