Dynamic image-based visual servoing for unmanned aerial vehicles with bounded inputs

Abstract

We present a dynamic image-based visual servoing (IBVS) control law for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a single downwards facing camera. The controller design is based on a dynamic model of the UAV and regulates the vehicle's relative pose to a planar visual target. The proposed approach uses a virtual camera which has zero roll and pitch motion. The IBVS image features are defined in the virtual camera image plane. Since the image feature error is stabilized in the virtual camera, the visual target can leave the real camera's field of view (FoV). To keep the visual target in the camera FoV, the proposed method bounds roll and pitch to sufficiently small prescribed values. A numerical simulation is presented to demonstrate the controller's performance.