A Cross-Platform Comparison of Visual Marker Based Approaches for Autonomous Flight of Quadrocopters

In this paper, we compare three different marker based approaches for six degrees of freedom (6DOF) pose estimation, which can be used for position and attitude control of micro aerial vehicles (MAV). All methods are able to achieve real time pose estimation onboard without assistance of any external metric sensor. Since these methods can be used in various working environments, we compare their performance by carrying out experiments across two different platforms: an AscTec Hummingbird and a Pixhawk quadrocopter. We evaluate each method’s accuracy by using an external tracking system and compare the methods with respect to their operating ranges and processing time. We also compare each method’s performance during autonomous takeoff, hovering and landing of a quadrocopter. Finally we show how the methods perform in an outdoor environment. The paper is an extended version of the one with the same title published at the ICUAS Conference 2013.