Abstract
Most current unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) primarily use a global positioning system (GPS) and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) for position estimation. However, compared to birds and insects, the abilities of current UAVs to recognize the environment are not sufficient. To achieve autonomous flight of UAVs, like birds, the UAVs should be able to process and respond to information from their surrounding environment immediately. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a direct visual servoing system for UAVs, using an onboard high-speed monocular camera. There are two advantages of this system. First, the high image sampling rates help to improve the ability to recognize the environment. Second, the issue of control latency can be effectively solved because the position control signals are transmitted to the flight controller directly. In the experiment, the UAV could recognize a target at update rates of about 350 Hz, and a target tracking task was successfully realized.
Highlights
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are often called drones or multicopters, have become a popular research topic because of their high autonomy and flexibility
Since the relative position between the target and quadrotor is used for position-based visual servoing, the quadrotor will keep flying to a setpoint during the target’s movement
Before the experiment for dynamic target tracking, we tested the performance of direct visual servoing in a position holding experiment
Summary
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are often called drones or multicopters, have become a popular research topic because of their high autonomy and flexibility. To achieve autonomous flight of a UAV, it is important to obtain its position and attitude in real time. In most current UAVs, an inertial measurement unit (IMU) is used to acquire the attitude, and the Global Positioning System (GPS) is used to acquire the position. These signals are fused by a Kalman filter. GPS is not suitable in indoor environments. Even outdoors, it is unsuitable if there are many obstacles
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