Image-Based Visual Servo Tracking Control of a Ground Moving Target for a Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

• Published in: Journal of intelligent & robotic systems Vol. 102; no. 4
• Main Authors: Yang, Lingjie, Liu, Zhihong, Wang, Xiangke, Yu, Xianguo, Wang, Guanzheng, Shen, Lincheng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.08.2021; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Analysis; Artificial Intelligence; Cameras; Control; Control methods; Control stability; Control theory; Drone aircraft; Electrical Engineering; Engineering; Fixed wings; Ground based control; Hardware-in-the-loop simulation; Laws, regulations and rules; Mechanical Engineering; Mechatronics; Moving targets; Regular Paper; Robotics; Robots; Servocontrol; Topical collection on Unmanned Systems; Tracking control; Tracking problem; Unmanned aerial vehicles; Control framework; Pan-tilt camera; Fixed-wing UAV; Image-based visual servoing; Deterministic finite automata model
• ISSN: 0921-0296; 1573-0409
• DOI: 10.1007/s10846-021-01425-y

This paper proposes a new control method for the ground moving target tracking problem by a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a monocular pan-tilt camera. By utilizing the image-based visual servoing, the control law can be directly designed in the image plane, thereby avoiding errors caused by the 3D position calculation. Based on that, we design a control framework to integrate the control of the UAV and the pan-tilt, which enables the UAV to track the target while maintaining the feature point near the image center. Furthermore, considering that the low-cost pan-tilt camera we use has restricted characteristics, we present a deterministic finite automata model to transit the states of tracking when the pan-tilt attitude reaches saturation, thereby improving the tracking ability of the UAV for the moving target. The stability proof of the controller is given, and extensive experiments of hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation and real flights are provided. The results show that the proposed method can achieve continuous robust tracking of the ground moving target.