Automatic navigation and landing of an indoor AR. drone quadrotor using ArUco marker and inertial sensors

Within the next few years, unmanned quadrotors are likely to become an important vehicle in humans' daily life. However, their automatic navigation and landing in indoor environments are among the commonly discussed topics in this regard. In fact, the quadrotor should be able to automatically find the landing point from the nearby position, navigate toward it, and finally, land on it accurately and smoothly. In this paper, we proposed a low-cost and thorough solution to this problem by using both bottom-facing and front-facing cameras of the drone. In addition, in the case that vision data were unavailable, inertial measurements alongside a Kalman filter were used to navigate the drone to achieve the promising continuity and reliability. An AR.Drone 2.0 quadrotor, as well as an ArUco marker, were employed in order to test the proposed method experimentally. The results indicated that the drone successfully landed on the predefined position with an acceptable time and accuracy.