Learning Pose Estimation for UAV Autonomous Navigation andLanding Using Visual-Inertial Sensor Data

In this work, we propose a new learning approach for autonomous navigation and landing of an Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicle (UAV). We develop a multimodal fusion of deep neural architectures for visual-inertial odometry. We train the model in an end-to-end fashion to estimate the current vehicle pose from streams of visual and inertial measurements. We first evaluate the accuracy of our estimation by comparing the prediction of the model to traditional algorithms on the publicly available EuRoC MAV dataset. The results illustrate a 25 % improvement in estimation accuracy over the baseline. Finally, we integrate the architecture in the closed-loop flight control system of Airsim - a plugin simulator for Unreal Engine - and we provide simulation results for autonomous navigation and landing.