A Practical Visual Servo Control for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

By Nicolas Guenard, Tarek Hamel, Robert E. Mahony. IEEE Transactions on robotics, 2008

338 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An image-based visual servo control is presented for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capable of stationary or quasi-stationary flight with the camera mounted onboard the vehicle. The target considered consists of a finite set of stationary and disjoint points lying in a plane. Control of the position and orientation dynamics is decoupled using a visual error based on spherical centroid data, along with estimations of the linear velocity and the gravitational inertial direction extracted from image features and an embedded inertial measurement unit. The visual error used compensates for poor conditioning of the image Jacobian matrix by introducing a nonhomogeneous gain term adapted to the visual sensitivity of the error measurements. A nonlinear controller, that ensures exponential convergence of the system considered, is derived for the full dynamics of the system using control Lyapunov function design techniques. Experimental results on a quadrotor UAV, developed by the French Atomic Energy Commission, demonstrate the robustness and performance of the proposed control strategy.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cacadab2417b665c71790ac7000e9ceda45aa5ce

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Citations in the corpus

The true role of accelerometer feedback in quadrotor control (2010, background): “Representative designs are: ultrasonic rangers [3]; (simple) GPS module when outdoors and infrared rangers when indoors [4]; carrier phase differential GPS [5]; laser rangefinder [6]; vision system [7], [8], [9]; laser rangefinder and vision system [10].”
Modeling and PD Control of a Quadrotor VTOL Vehicle (2007, background): “N. Guernad et. al. and D. Suter et. al. also studied on image based visual servo control for quadrotors [9, 10].”
Survey of advances in guidance, navigation, and control of unmanned rotorcraft systems (2012, methodology): “An extension of this flight controller has been implemented on the CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission) quadrotor for imagebased visual servoing of the vehicle (Guenard et al., 2008).”
Build Your Own Quadrotor: Open-Source Projects on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (2012, background): “Successes have been reported from academia, such as the X4-flyer [9], OS4 [10], STARMAC [11], and Pixhawk [12] to mention a few.”
Survey on Computer Vision for UAVs: Current Developments and Trends (2017, methodology): “Similarly [28] proposed a visual servoing control scheme for the stabilization of a quadrotor UAV.”
Vision-based control of a quadrotor for perching on lines (2014, background): “Approaches in [11], [12] were the first to introduce pure image based visual servoing for quadrotors by exploiting the structural passivity in the dynamics of image features [13].”
Landing a VTOL Unmanned Aerial Vehicle on a Moving Platform Using Optical Flow (2012, background): “1), a VTOL vehicle that is ideally suited for stationary and quasi-stationary flight [28].”
Robust Nonlinear Control for Path Tracking of a Quad‐Rotor Helicopter (2015, methodology): “Backstepping approaches applied to the quadrotor helicopter are found in [17,16,15,11,23].”