Authors:
Alexandre Brandão
1
;
Felipe Martins
2
and
Higor Soneguetti
2
Affiliations:
1
Federal University of Viçosa, Brazil
;
2
Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Nonlinear Control, Vision-based Control, Quadrotor.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Image Processing
;
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
;
Robot Design, Development and Control
;
Robotics and Automation
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are versatile machines that can be used in a variety of applications, such as
automatic monitoring of crops and water channels, pest detection, animal counting etc. Autonomous flying is
a desirable feature for UAVs, especially for those that are frequently used in monitoring and inspection of large
areas. In some situations, global positioning system signal is not guaranteed or its error might be too large,
hence other methods of local position feedback are required. In such a context, we present the development of
a vision-based line following strategy for an autonomous UAV. The proposed system is intended to guide an
autonomous UAV to follow water channel margins, crop lines and other similar patterns, to support automatic
monitoring and inspection activities. We present the design of a nonlinear path following controller and we
show that the resulting closed-loop system is stable in the sense of Lyapunov. We also propose a visual-based
line detectio
n algorithm that it is capable of detecting the average position and orientation of the main lines
on the image frames captured by the UAV downwards facing camera. Finally, we present and discuss some
experimental results that show the good performance of the proposed system.
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