Autonomous Robotic Plane Navigates Pillars in Parking Garage Without GPS

Posted on August 14, 2012

Researchers at MIT's Robotics Group have built an autonomous robotic plane capable of navigating obstacles in an underground parking garage without the use of GPS. The plane is currently pre-loaded with a digital map of the garage. However, the researchers say flying around the obstacles in the garage still requires the plane to make many computations:

But the plane still has to determine where it is on the map in real time, using data from a laser rangefinder and inertial sensors - accelerometers and gyroscopes - that it carries on board. It also has to deduce its orientation - how much it's tilted in any direction - its velocity, and its acceleration. Because many of those properties are multidimensional, to determine its state at any moment, the plane has to calculate 15 different values.

The MIT researchers' next step will be to develop algorithms that can build a map of the plane's environment on the fly. The flight through the parking garage under MIT's Stata Center can be seen around the 2:10 mark in the video. Take a look:

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