Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant attention in recent years. Low-cost platforms using inexpensive sensor payloads have been shown to provide satisfactory flight and navigation capabilities. In this report, we survey vision and control methods that can be applied to low-cost UAVs, and we list some popular inexpensive platforms and application fields where they are useful. We also highlight the sensor suites used where this information is available. We overview, among others, feature detection and tracking, optical flow and visual servoing, low-level stabilization and high-level planning methods. We then list popular low-cost UAVs, selecting mainly quadrotors. We discuss applications, restricting our focus to the field of infrastructure inspection. Finally, as an example, we formulate two use-cases for railway inspection, a less explored application field, and illustrate the usage of the vision and control techniques reviewed by selecting appropriate ones to tackle these use-cases. To select vision methods, we run a thorough set of experimental evaluations.
Highlights
Unmanned vehicles, including Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), offer new perspectives for transportation and services. the legal requirements are still quite restrictive [1], UAV applications are becomingSensors 2015, 15 widespread, from military usage to civil applications, such as aerial imaging [2] or various inspection tasks [3,4].We focus here on low-cost, small-scale and lightweight UAVs that can be reliably used outdoors
While the specific limits on size, weight and cost are, arbitrary to an extent, we are motivated to select them by the railway inspection application we discuss in Section 6: since the UAVs are small they are unlikely to damage a train in the event of an unavoidable collision, and their low cost makes them replaceable
We suggest the use of the rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) and model predictive control (MPC)-based algorithms
Summary
Unmanned vehicles, including UAVs, offer new perspectives for transportation and services. We describe methods that work in any application, but are motivated by infrastructure inspection, so we point out the connections of vision and control with this area. Presents techniques for low-level stabilization and control, ranging from simple linear to more accurate nonlinear controllers, while [18] discusses high-level planning Another survey [19] overviews planning methods from the perspective of uncertainties. We provide an overall, high-level overview of both vision and control, focusing on methods relevant to recent low-cost quadrotors and infrastructure inspection applications.
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