Robust vision-based tracking control of VTOL unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

This study addresses the problem of robust tracking control of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles through a vision-based control technique. The main objective is to design a new theoretical result for vision-based tracking of a moving target in the presence of external disturbances. In particular, the proposed control framework is able to simultaneously guarantee a saturated thrust input, and measurable and bounded desired angular velocity and acceleration while dealing with time-varying disturbances in the dynamics of the system. Considering different sets of visual features, two control schemes are proposed, where the features are defined based on perspective image moments. Simulation studies are conducted in perturbed conditions to verify the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.