Autonomous Hovering and Landing of a Quad-rotor Micro Aerial Vehicle by Means of on Ground Stereo Vision System

Abstract

On ground stereo vision system is used for autonomous hovering and landing of a quad-rotor Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV). This kind of system has an advantage to support embedded vision system for autonomous hovering and landing, since an embedded vision system occasionally gives inaccurate distance calculation due to either vibra-tion problem or unknown geometry of the landing target. Color based object tracking by using Continuously Adaptive Mean Shift (CAMSHIFT) algorithm was examined. Nonlinear model of quad-rotor MAV and a PID controller were used for autonomous hovering and landing. The result shows that the Camshift based object tracking algo-rithm has good performance. Additionally, the comparison between the stereo vision system based and GPS based autonomous hovering of a quad-rotor MAV shows that stereo vision system has better performance. The accuracy of the stereo vision sys-tem is about 1 meter in the longitudinal and lateral direction when the quad-rotor flies in 6 meters of altitude. In the same experimental condition, the GPS based system accuracy is about 3 meters. Additionally, experiment on autonomous landing gives a reliable result.