Vision-based target detection and tracking for a miniature pan-tilt inertially stabilized platform

Abstract

This paper presents a novel visual servoing sheme for a miniature pan-tilt intertially stabilized platform (ISP). A fully customized ISP can be mounted on a miniature quadcopter to achieve stationary or moving target detection and tracking. The airborne pan-tilt ISP can effectively isolate a disturbing rotational motion of the carrier, ensuring the stabilization of the optical axis of the camera in order to obtain a clear video image. Meanwhile, the ISP guarantees that the target is always on the optical axis of the camera, so as to achieve the target detection and tracking. The vision-based tracking control design adopts a cascaded control structure based on the mathematical model, which can accurately reflect the dynamic characteristics of the ISP. The inner loop of the proposed controller employs a proportional lag compensator to improve the stability of the optical axis, and the outer loop adopts the feedback linearization-based sliding mode control method to achieve the target tracking. Numerical simulations and laboratory experiments demonstrate that the proposed controller can achieve satisfactory tracking performance.