Abstract
We present a novel stereo-based method for the interception of a static or moving target, from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). This technique is directly applicable for outdoor applications such as search and rescue, monitoring and surveillance, and complex landing scenarios. Stereo vision is particularly useful for the interception of a moving target as it intrinsically measures the relative position and velocity between the UAV and the person or object. The target position is computed geometrically using its direction, as viewed by the vision system, and the UAV’s stereo height. A Kalman filter computes a reliable estimate of relative position and velocity using the target centroid. The performance of this method is validated by conducting a number of closed-loop interceptions for both static and moving target cases. The mean interception error is found to be 0.01m with a standard deviation of 0.33m in tests with static targets and 0.14m with a standard deviation of 0.24m in tests with moving targets. Our method has been field-tested outdoors and provides results comparable to other vision-based techniques that have been tested under more controlled indoor conditions.
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Strydom, R., Thurrowgood, S., Denuelle, A., Srinivasan, M.V. (2015). UAV Guidance: A Stereo-Based Technique for Interception of Stationary or Moving Targets. In: Dixon, C., Tuyls, K. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9287. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22416-9_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22416-9_30
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