AIRA: A Low-cost IR-based Approach Towards Autonomous Precision Drone Landing and NLOS Indoor Navigation

TL;DR

AIRA tackles the challenge of autonomous indoor drone landing for palm-sized, low-power platforms by replacing high-cost vision or RF sensing with a compact infrared light-field approach. It leverages a simple IR light source at the landing pad and a three-PD drone sensor that, aided by a motorized PD, estimates the strongest light direction to guide the drone to the target, achieving sub-10 cm accuracy from up to 11.1 m while consuming only micro-watts per sensor. The approach demonstrates robust performance in low-light and partially occluded (NLOS) indoor environments, with total cost under $83 and mass under 18 g, and shows favorable comparisons to RGB-marker baselines in terms of range and energy efficiency. This work enables practical, low-energy indoor deployment of microdrones for tasks requiring precise and autonomous landing.

Abstract

Automatic drone landing is an important step for achieving fully autonomous drones. Although there are many works that leverage GPS, video, wireless signals, and active acoustic sensing to perform precise landing, autonomous drone landing remains an unsolved challenge for palm-sized microdrones that may not be able to support the high computational requirements of vision, wireless, or active audio sensing. We propose AIRA, a low-cost infrared light-based platform that targets precise and efficient landing of low-resource microdrones. AIRA consists of an infrared light bulb at the landing station along with an energy efficient hardware photodiode (PD) sensing platform at the bottom of the drone. AIRA costs under 83 USD, while achieving comparable performance to existing vision-based methods at a fraction of the energy cost. AIRA requires only three PDs without any complex pattern recognition models to accurately land the drone, under $10$cm of error, from up to $11.1$ meters away, compared to camera-based methods that require recognizing complex markers using high resolution images with a range of only up to $1.2$ meters from the same height. Moreover, we demonstrate that AIRA can accurately guide drones in low light and partial non line of sight scenarios, which are difficult for traditional vision-based approaches.

Figures (17)

• Figure 1: Overview of AIRA.
• Figure 2: Setup for measuring light fields.
• Figure 3: Measured lightfields using off-the-shelf components.
• Figure 4: Comparing light field landing time, offset, and example trajectories across four methods of generating light fields.
• Figure 5: PD arrays, methods, and placements considered. a) array of PDs (6 shown) - ArPD6 and b) single PD where the drone sweeps 360 degrees along its yaw.