I participated in the 2015 AHS Micro Air Vehicle Student Challenge as a member of Georgia Tech Aerial Robotics club This was a competition organized by American Helicopter Society (AHS). We are allowed to use a vehicle less than or equal to 500 grams, and no external power and sensors are allowed. The mission was to autonomously take off from a helipad and to search a target. Once the target is found, the vehicle needs to hover over the target for 30 seconds. It comes back to the helipad after establishing the hover and lands on it. Everything has to be done autonomously. There were mainly three challenges in this mission. First, since it’s an indoor mission, the navigation has to be done without a GPS sensor. We used a vision-aided inertial navigation to solve this problem. Second, the vehicle has to find the helipad and target by using a camera. This was the part I mainly contributed. I combined the famous Viola-Jones object detection method with an Extended Kalman filter framework so that it can filter out false positives and track only the consistent measurements. Finally, this has to be done with a 500-gram vehicle. Our hardware team did a really good job. Our MAV is equipped with a i7-processor, which weighs approximately one-third of the gross weight of this vehicle. Basically, it’s a flying computer. We placed first by achieving all the missions required in less than 2 minutes. Watch the Youtube video!