Antenna alignment by using computer vision technology

Abstract

An automatic alignment approach is proposed for tracking unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) antennas by using computer vision technology. In this approach, UAV carries a low‐gain omnidirectional antenna and a ground station uses high gain directional antenna which can be driven by a pan‐tilt to point to UAV's antenna. A camera is bound together with the antenna and a computer is employed to recognize the video and control motion of the pan‐tilt, so as to move the image of UAV's antenna toward the center of the whole picture. If the distance between center of UAV image and center of the picture is kept within a few pixels, then the antennas are aligned. Performance analysis and experiment results are given, showing that the proposed antenna autoalignment approach can achieve accurate alignment of the antennas with an angle error of less than 1°.

Automatic Alignment Method of Underwater Charging Platform Based on Monocular Vision Recognition

“…Underwater, due to the refraction of light between different media, the camera's FOV will be reduced. Using Equation (12), the camera's FOV is calculated to be 132.6537 mm × 235.8289 mm.…”

“…Finally, they control the actuator to achieve the initial point alignment. In another study, Chen et al [12] developed an automatic alignment method for tracking the antenna of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) using computer vision technology. The antenna angle is adjusted using the relative position between the center of the UAV image and the center of the camera image fixed on the antenna.…”