Visual servo tracking control of quadrotor with a cable suspended load

Abstract

To follow a moving target, the visual servo control of a quadrotor with a cable suspended load is proposed. A monocular camera with rotation degree along y axis is equipped on the quadrotor. The dynamic model for the whole system is presented to design target tracking controller. An image based visual servoing controller is proposed to provide position and yaw reference information for the quadrotor control, when the quadrotor is too far away from target. OpenTLD is used to provide the visual feedback information for visual servoing. When the quadrotor is close enough to the target, the AprilTag technology is applied to provide the pose information for position control. Based on the dynamic model and the reference information from the visual servoing or AprilTag, a quadrotor-load PD controller is presented. Finally, simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.