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.

Low-cost vision-based 6-DOF MAV localization using IR beacons

“…It has been shown that the PixArt IR tracking sensor can be successfully applied in a visual servoing algorithm on a quadrotor vehicle [3], without the need for powerful processing hardware. The position and yaw angle are estimated from visual information, while the pitch and roll angles are obtained from the IMU.…”

“…In this work measurements using an on-board PixArt infrared (IR) tracking sensor are used with a point-based pose estimation algorithm [5] to compute the full 6 DOF pose in real-time for visual servoing purposes. Although the PixArt IR tracking sensor has been used in visual servoing of MAVs before [3], it has not previously been implemented using a general pose estimation algorithm. The small size, low weight and cost of the IR tracking sensor allow for implementation on a low-cost MAV platform and detection of active IR markers allows for robust performance.…”

“…Visionbased solutions have been shown to provide high accuracy at low cost and weight [1], [2]. Indeed, vision sensors have been used in visual servoing algorithms to provide accurate flight control of MAVs [1]- [3]. Due to the high processing This power demands generally associated with computer vision algorithms these solutions often required powerful ground computers.…”

“…Due to the high processing This power demands generally associated with computer vision algorithms these solutions often required powerful ground computers. Thus, much of the work in visual servoing of MAVs used simplified localization algorithms [2], [3] or external vision systems [1]. These limitations restricted the area of autonomous operation of the vehicle substantially to some small space relative to the vision target or to specific tasks [2].…”

4DoF drift free navigation using inertial cues and optical flow

“…The drift in position and yaw is either very low or even eliminated by using known, world-fix structures. Sensors that are commonly used for map generation are laser scanners [6], [7] or cameras incorporating known markers [8], [9] or SLAM/VO techniques [10], [11]. Since laser scanners are still too heavy and power hungry for small quadrotor systems, our work focuses on vision based approaches.…”