Person-following UAVs

Abstract

We consider the design of vision-based control algorithms for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), so as to enable a UAV to autonomously follow a person. A new vision-based control architecture is proposed with the goals of 1) robustly following the user and 2) implementing following behaviors programmed by manipulation of visual patterns. This is achieved within a detection/tracking paradigm, where the target is a programmable badge worn by the user. This badge contains a visual pattern with two components. The first is fixed and used to locate the user. The second is variable and implements a code used to program the UAV behavior. A biologically inspired tracking/recognition architecture, combining bottom-up and top-down saliency mechanisms, a novel image similarity measure, and an affine validation procedure, is proposed to detect the badge in the scene. The badge location is used by a control algorithm to adjust the UAV flight parameters so as to maintain the user in the center of the field of view. The detected badge is further analyzed to extract the visual code that commands the UAV behavior This is used to control the height and distance of the UAV relative to the user.