Automatic Take Off, Tracking and Landing of a Miniature UAV on a Moving Carrier Vehicle

Abstract

We present a system consisting of a miniature unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a small carrier vehicle, in which the UAV is capable of autonomously starting from the moving ground vehicle, tracking it at a constant distance and landing on a platform on the carrier in motion.Our visual tracking approach differs from other methods by using low-cost, lightweight commodity consumer hardware. As main sensor we use a Wii remote infrared (IR) camera, which allows robust tracking of a pattern of IR lights in conditions without direct sunlight. The system does not need to communicate with the ground vehicle and works with an onboard 8-bit microcontroller. Nevertheless the position and orientation relative to the IR pattern is estimated at a frequency of approximately 50 Hz. This enables the UAV to fly fully autonomously, performing flight control, self-stabilisation and visual tracking of the ground vehicle.We present experiments in which our UAV performs autonomous flights with a moving ground carrier describing a circular path and where the carrier is rotating. The system provides small errors and allows for safe, autonomous indoor flights.

An Onboard Monocular Vision System for Autonomous Takeoff, Hovering and Landing of a Micro Aerial Vehicle

“…Two main categories of visual landing systems exist for rotorcraft UAVs, being used both on large scale helicopters with a high payload and on MAVs with a very limited payload. The first one is for landing a UAV on a predefined target [20][17] [14] [23], which requires precise pose estimation of the UAV relative to the target. The second category is for landing on a suitable area [11] [3], which uses vision for the detection of a good enough place for landing.…”

“…Wenzel et al [22] presented a low-cost solution for visual tracking a landing place by using a Wii remote infrared camera and four infrared LED markers. In [23], they achieved takeoff, hovering and landing of a MAV on a moving platform. Xu et al [24] also use a cooperative object and an infrared camera for pose estimation of UAVs, but only the yaw angle is computed.…”

Risk analysis for smart homes and domestic robots using robust shape and physics descriptors, and complex boosting techniques

“…Finally, with advances in robotics and unmanned drones, the functionality to 95 fully automate these devices using vision based techniques is emerging [42,55].…”

Tracking control of a UAV with a parallel visual processor

“…Developments concerned with tracking targets from close range typically focus on maintaining a close relative position and velocity to the target. A popular challenge is to use the visual target for landing such as in [11], [12] and [13] where the authors managed to program the UAVs to land on moving targets. These previous works, however, track cooperative targets that are either fitted with beacons and or GPS informed telemetry links to aid the UAV in acquiring an accurate lock onto the landing zone.…”