Autonomous Quadrotor Landing using Continuous On-Board Monocular-Vision-based Elevation Mapping

In this paper, we propose a resource-efficient system for real-time 3D terrain reconstruction and landingspot detection for micro aerial vehicles. The system runs on an on-board smartphone processor and requires only the input of a single downlooking camera and an inertial measurement unit. We generate a two-dimensional elevation map that is probabilistic, of fixed size, and robot-centric, thus, always covering the area immediately underneath the robot. The elevation map is continuously updated at a rate o