Abstract
Autonomous UAVs offer advantages in industrial, agriculture, environment inspection, and logistics applications. Sometimes the use of cooperative UAVs is important to solve specific demands or achieve productivity gain in these applications. An important technical challenge is the precise positioning between two or more UAVs in a cooperative task flight. Some techniques provide solutions, like the GNSS positioning, visual and LIDAR slam, and computer vision intelligent algorithms, but all these techniques present limitations that must be solved to work properly in specific environments. The proposal of new cooperative position methods is important to face these challenges. The present work proposes an evaluation of a visual relative positioning architecture between two small UAV multi-rotor aircraft working in a master-slave operation, based on an Augmented Reality tag tool. The simulation results obtained absolute error measurements lower than 0.2 cm mean and 0.01 standard deviation for X, Y and Z directions. Yaw measurements presented an absolute error lower than 0.5 \(^\circ \)C with a 0.02–5 \(^\circ \)C standard deviation. The real-world experiments executing autonomous flight with the slave UAV commanded by the master UAV achieved success in 8 of 10 experiment rounds, proving that the proposed architecture is a good approach to building cooperative master-slave UAV applications.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Lee, H.-S., Shin, B.-S., Thomasson, J.A., Wang, T., Zhang, Z., Han, X.: Development of multiple uav collaborative driving systems for improving field phenotyping. Sensors 22(4), 1423 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3390/s22041423, https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/22/4/1423, ISSN 1424–8220
Lu, J., Fu, J., Zhang, J., Zhang, K.: Multi-machines and Multi-tasks Scheduling for UAV Power Inspection in Smart Grid. In: Liu, Q., Liu, X., Chen, B., Zhang, Y., Peng, J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Engineering and Networks. LNEE, vol. 808, pp. 1579–1587. Springer, Singapore (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6554-7_174
Kanellakis, C., Mansouri, S.S., Fresk, E., Kominiak, D., Nikolakopoulos, G.: Cooperative uavs as a tool for aerial inspection of large scale aging infrastructure. In: 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 5040–5040 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2018.8593996
Zimmermann, F., Eling, C., Klingbeil, L., Kuhlmann, H.: Precise positioning of uavs - dealing with challenging rtk-gps measurement conditions during automated uav flights. ISPRS Annal. Photog. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. 4(2W3), 95–102 (2017). https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-IV-2-W3-95-2017, ISSN 21949050
Al-Kaff, A., Martín, D., García, F., de la Escalera, A., Armingol, J.M.: Survey of computer vision algorithms and applications for unmanned aerial vehicles. Expert Syst. Appli. 92, 447–463 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2017.09.033, ISSN 09574174
APRIL Robotics Laboratory. AprilTags Visual Fiducial System (2018). https://april.eecs.umich.edu/software/apriltag
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. Augmented Reality/3D Tracking (2017). http://virtual.vtt.fi/virtual/proj2/multimedia/
Hinas, A., Roberts, J.M., Gonzalez, F.: Vision-based target finding and inspection of a ground target using a multirotor UAV system. Sensors (Switzerland) 17(12), 2929 (2017). https://doi.org/10.3390/s17122929, ISSN 14248220
Kayhani, N., Heins, A., Zhao, W., Nahangi, M., McCabe, B., Schoellig, A.: Improved tag-based indoor localization of uavs using extended kalman filter. In Al-Hussein, M. (ed.) Proceedings of the 36th International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (ISARC), Banff, Canada, pp. 624–631. International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction (IAARC), May 2019. https://doi.org/10.22260/ISARC2019/0083, ISBN 978-952-69524-0-6
Wang, S., Hu, T.: Ros-gazebo supported platform for tag-in-loop indoor localization of quadrocopter. In: Chen, W., Hosoda, K., Menegatti, E., Shimizu, M., Wang, H. (eds.) IAS 2016. AISC, vol. 531, pp. 185–197. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48036-7_14
Boudjit, K., Larbes, C.: Detection and implementation autonomous target tracking with a quadrotor ar.drone. In: 2015 12th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO), vol. 02, pp. 223–230 (2015)
Muskardin, T.: A novel landing system to increase payload capacity and operational availability of high altitude long endurance uav. In: 2016 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), pp. 495–504 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICUAS.2016.7502668
Hood, S., Benson, K., Hamod, P., Madison, D., O’Kane, J.M., Rekleitis, I.: Bird’s eye view: Cooperative exploration by UGV and UAV. In: 2017 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, ICUAS 2017, pp. 247–255 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICUAS.2017.7991513
ROS.org. ROS (2019). http://www.ros.org
Monajjemi, M.: Bebop Autonomy - ROS Driver for Parrot Bebop Drone (2018). https://bebop-autonomy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Copellia Robotics. CoppeliaSim (2019). https://www.coppeliarobotics.com/
Acknowledgment
The authors are grateful to the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal for financial support through national funds FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC) to CeDRI - Research Centre in Digitalization and Intelligent Robotics (UIDB/05757/2020 and UIDP/05757/2020) and SusTEC (LA/P/0007/2021).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rech, L.C., Junior, L.B., Berger, G.S., Lima, J., Cantieri, A.R., Wehrmeister, M.A. (2023). Proposal of a Visual Positioning Architecture for Master-Slave Autonomous UAV Applications. In: Tardioli, D., Matellán, V., Heredia, G., Silva, M.F., Marques, L. (eds) ROBOT2022: Fifth Iberian Robotics Conference. ROBOT 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 590. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21062-4_30
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21062-4_30
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-21061-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-21062-4
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)