Vision-based Autonomous Tracking Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

During the past decades, the field of aerial robotics has become the hot-spot for researchers, especially control of autonomous robots navigating in indoor environments. A lot of work has been published but still needs further efforts. In this paper, the problem of marker-based tracking control of a ground moving target and its solution is discussed. The main motivating application of this work is tracking a ground moving target while observing the environment at the same time. So the whole work mainly consists of two parts: Object recognition and tracking control. In the object recognition part, recognizing the marker and calculating the position of the target using the identified marker is discussed. While tracking control part, mainly focused on applying a control algorithm to track the moving target. A drone with a full HD camera is utilized for marker tracking and using it as a bird's eye view. With a larger field of view, surrounding can be observed. No external tracking system is used. In the end, experiments (including indoor and outdoor environments) and results are discussed, which show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. For tracking of the target, markers of different sizes and numbers (including single and multiple markers) are used. The performance of multiple marker-based tracking control in terms of states versus time plots is compared with the single marker tracking approach to elaborate our presented scenario.

I. Introduction

In the last decades, the area of aerial robotics has been discussed by a lot of researchers as it has applications in different areas like military [1], [2], and civilian [3]. Furthermore, because of its small size, it can fly in narrow environments. Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have applications in agriculture sectors [4]. Remote sensing based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be performed to increase the possibility of acquiring field data for precision agriculture applications [5]. Autonomous UAVs have greatly benefited the search and rescue operations to examine the position and collect evidence about the missing persons. It also saves time and considers safety as well [6]. To monitor terrorist activities [7] and keep an eye on suspicious movements of people, border surveillance [8]. Last but not least, the delivery of first aid kit [9] are some of the reasons that aerial robotics got the attention of researchers. Furthermore, the quadcopter has a simple mechanical design, lightweight and no Swash-Plate mechanism [10].