UruBots UAV -- Air Emergency Service Indoor Team Description Paper for FIRA 2024

TL;DR

This paper presents the Urubots UAV designed for the FIRA 2024 Air Emergency Service (Indoor) competition, focusing on onboard, vision-based autonomy without GPS or off-board processing. It describes a hardware-software stack centered on ROS and MAVLink, featuring a Jetson Nano onboard processor, stereoscopic vision, QR-code detection, and a Pixhawk flight controller orchestrated by a Python-based mission planner. The approach aims to reduce operator workload by performing navigation, localization, and QR-code-based routing entirely onboard, suitable for GPS-denied indoor scenarios. The work demonstrates a compact, self-contained autonomous solution with potential applicability to indoor emergency inspection tasks in real-world environments.

Abstract

This document addresses the description of the corresponding "Urubots" Team for the 2024 Fira Air League, "Air Emergency Service (Indoor)." We introduce our team and an autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that relies on computer vision for its flight control. This UAV has the capability to perform a wide variety of navigation tasks in indoor environments, without requiring the intervention of an external operator or any form of external processing, resulting in a significant decrease in workload and manual dependence. Additionally, our software has been designed to be compatible with the vehicle's structure and for its application to the competition circuit. In this paper, we detail additional aspects about the mechanical structure, software, and application to the FIRA competition.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: UAV construction image.
• Figure 2: Components of our UAV.
• Figure 3: UAV construction image.
• Figure 4: Competition scenario and our qualification scenario.