Visual tracking and following of a quadrocopter by another quadrocopter

Abstract

Abstract-We present a follow-the-leader scenario with a system of two small low-cost quadrocopters of different types and configurations.The leader is a Parrot AR.Drone which is controlled by an iPad App utilizing the visual odometry provided by the quadrocopter and pilots it autonomously. The follower is an Asctec Hummingbird which is controlled by an onboard 8-bit microcontroller. Neither communication nor external sensors are required. A custom-built pan/tilt unit and the camera of a Nintendo Wii remote tracks a pattern of infrared lights and allows for online pose estimation. A base station allows for monitoring the behavior but is not required for autonomous flights.Our efficient solution of the perspective-3-point problem allows for estimating the pose of the camera relative to the pattern in six degrees of freedom at a high frequency on the microcontroller. The presented experiments include a scenario in which the follower follows the leader with a constant distance of two meters flying different shapes in narrow, GPS-denied indoor environment.

Lightweight infrared sensing for relative navigation of quadrotors

“…Finally, previous work has demonstrated successful flight using a similar Wii IR camera and active IR LED markers on a quadrotor [14,15]. The work in this paper builds on these results by combining the relative position measurements from the camera with on-board inertial sensors to create high-rate filtered data.…”

“…Knowing that the LEDs have a fixed baseline, the Wii remote can calculate range and roll angle relative to the sensor bar [12,16]. Similarly, the sensing technique proposed here utilizes a set of active IR LEDs in a known configuration with the IR camera from a Wii remote to detect the IR points [14,15].…”

Hierarchical fiducial marker design for pose estimation in large‐scale scenarios

“…There are various designs for the markers, aimed at enhancing the robustness of a single marker or at the easiness of detecting them. The simplest proposals consist of using some particular points as markers, such as visually detectable balls (Masselli & Zell, ), infrared beacons (Dorfmüller & Wirth, ; Wenzel, Masselli, & Zell, ), or retroreflective spheres (Ribo, Pinz, & Fuhrmann, ). Although those specially designed markers are easily separated from the background, their identification is difficult to obtain or it involves a complex process.…”

Vision-aided Guidance and Navigation for Close Formation Flight

“…A more popular visual approach is feature‐based, with passive techniques utilizing features such as corners in the image (Mammarella et al., ; Vendra et al., ) and active methods using optical markers (Darling, ; Fosbury & Crassidis, ; Lugo, Masselli, & Zell, ; Mahboubi, Kolter, Wang, Bower, & Ng, ; Mati, Pollini, Lunghi, Innocenti, & Campa, ; Wenzel, Masselli, & Zell, ; Williamson et al., ). Indoor multirotor experiments have demonstrated vision‐only feature‐based relative pose estimation for leader‐follower following (Lugo et al., ; Wenzel et al., ), and results in Mahboubi et al. () showed that an air‐to‐air optical marker based localization system could work in an outdoor, airborne environment.…”