Abstract
The key to the docking phase of autonomous aerial refueling missions is the relative pose measurement between the drogue and unmanned aerial vehicles. A novel measurement method for drogue-UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) relative poses based on monocular vision is proposed in this paper. An adaptive arc-level structural feature extraction algorithm is applied to obtain the features that can be used for the measurements. In this algorithm, the projection of the end plane of the drogue in the image plane is accurately extracted based on an extraction quality metric. The projection contour and centroid of the internal black part of the drogue form the structural feature for the measurements. A robust pose estimation algorithm is presented to estimate the relative pose between the drogue and the UAV. The pose can be solved using a cone that is composed of the optical center of the camera and the structural feature. A Kalman filter is then applied to robustly estimate the pose of the drogue. A simulation and ground experiment are used to verify the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method, which achieves good performance compared with other methods.
Highlights
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in military and civilian fields, but the biggest current limitation is their insufficient flight times and effective loads
The motivation of this paper is to provide a real time highprecision pose measurement method based on monocular vision for drogue-probe autonomous aerial refueling
RELATED WORK The relative pose measurement method for a drogue based on vision for autonomous aerial refueling can full fill imaging and measurement tasks, including the potential to be installed without modification to the drogue, and can obtain more precise five degrees of freedom (DOF) pose, which is why this measurement method has received gradual study
Summary
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in military and civilian fields, but the biggest current limitation is their insufficient flight times and effective loads. The implementation of the vision-based measurement method requires a camera to be installed on the UAV to provide the images of the target (that is, the drogue of the tanker), which are processed to derive the pose information. Xu et al [13] designed a binocular vision-based UAV autonomous aerial refueling platform for AAR and obtained the poses using the known geometrical relationship of 7 points. Since binocular vision measurement is limited by the effect of the baseline length, it is mostly applied to boom AAR, which is a close-range measurement These methods always need artificial marks by modifying the drogue. The motivation of this paper is to provide a real time highprecision pose measurement method based on monocular vision for drogue-probe autonomous aerial refueling.
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