The ETH-MAV Team in the MBZ International Robotics Challenge

This article describes the hardware and software systems of the Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) used by the ETH Z\"urich team in the 2017 Mohammed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge. The aim was to develop robust outdoor platforms with the autonomous capabilities required for the competition, by extending and integrating state-of-the-art methods in various fields, including computer vision, sensor fusion, optimal control, and probabilistic robotics. This paper presents the major components of the system architectures, and discusses results of the MAV-based challenges in the competition. Main highlights include securing second place both in the individual search, pick, and place task of Challenge 3 and the Grand Challenge, with autonomous landing executed in less than a minute and a visual servoing success rate of over 90% for object pickups.