Spherical Fully Covered UAV with Autonomous Indoor Localization

This paper presents a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) with intrinsic safety which can interact with people and obstacles while flying in an indoor environment in an autonomous way. A system description including mechanical features, the design of the external protective case, electrical connections and the communication using the Robot Operating System (ROS) between the different devices is presented. Then, the dynamic model of the aerial system taking into account the protective case, the local positioning algorithm (Hector SLAM) and the control models implemented are also described. Different experimental results, which include simulation in Gazebo and real flights are shown to verify the positioning system developed. Two additional experiments have also been tested to validate two emergency safety systems in case of a failure in the position estimation is detected.