Visual servoing of micro aerial vehicle landing on ground platform

Abstract

This paper presents the visual servoing methodology that lands a micro aerial vehicle on a ground platform in the indoor environments. Since the space in the indoor environment is usually limited, both of the size of micro aerial vehicle and landing platform has to be small. Thus, the visual servoing based on two pin-hole cameras mounted on the front and belly of micro aerial vehicle is suitable for such scenario. The visual feature extraction of the landing platform is proposed to detect the specific image pattern on it. The flying control strategies with the camera switching are developed to search and approach the landing platform. The aligning control during the landing procedure is designed by the fuzzy logic control with the target position error on image. The overall performance of the landing algorithm has been validated in the online experiments.

Precision Landing for Low-Maintenance Remote Operations with UAVs

“…In order to obtain a heading reference for the pattern, it needs to be asymmetric. The pattern can be asymmetric in its shape or other features, such as color [53][54][55].…”