Exploiting Physical Contacts for Robustness Improvement of a Dot-painting Mission by a Micro Air Vehicle

In this paper we address the problem of dot painting on a wall by a quadrotor Micro Air Vehicle (MAV), using on-board low cost sensors (monocular camera and IMU) for localization. A method is proposed to cope with uncertainties on the initial positioning of the MAV with respect to the wall and to deal with walls composed of multiple segments. This method is based on an online estimation algorithm that makes use of information of physical contacts detected by the drone during the flight to improve the positioning accuracy of the painted dots. Simulation results are presented to assess quantitatively the efficiency of the proposed approaches.