Vision Based Autonomous Orientational Control for Aerial Manipulation via On-board FPGA

Abstract

We describe an FPGA-based on-board control system for autonomous orientation of an aerial robot to assist aerial manipulation tasks. The system is able to apply yaw control to aid an operator to precisely position a drone when it is nearby a bar-like object. This is achieved by applying parallel Hough transform enhanced with a novel image space separation method, enabling highly reliable results in various circumstances combined with high performance. The feasibility of this approach is shown by applying the system to a multi-rotor aerial robot equipped with an upward directed robotic hand on top of the airframe developed for high altitude manipulation tasks. In order to grasp a barlike object, orientation of the bar object is observed from the image data obtained by a monocular camera mounted on the robot. This data is then analyzed by the on-board FPGA system to control yaw angle of the aerial robot. In experiments, reliable yaw-orientation control of the aerial robot is achieved.