Download or read book Vision Based Navigation for Autonomous Landing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles written by Paul A. Ghyzel and published by . This book was released on 2000-09-01 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for modern military operations is expected to expand in the 21st Century, including increased deployment of UAVs from Navy ships at sea. Autonomous operation of UAVs from ships at sea requires the UAV to land on a moving ship using only passive sensors installed in the UAV. This thesis investigates the feasibility of using passive vision sensors installed in the UAV to estimate the UAV position relative to the moving platform. A navigation algorithm based on photogrammetry and perspective estimation is presented for numerically determining the relative position and orientation of an aircraft with respect to a ship that possesses three visibly significant points with known separation distances. Original image processing algorithms that reliably locate visually significant features in monochrome images are developed. Monochrome video imagery collected during flight test with an infrared video camera mounted in the nose of a UAV during actual landing approaches is presented. The navigation and image processing algorithms are combined to reduce the flight test images into vehicle position estimates. These position estimates are compared to truth data to demonstrate the feasibility of passive, vision-based sensors for aircraft navigation. Conclusions are drawn, and recommendations for further study are presented.

Download or read book Real time Evaluation of Vision based Navigation for Autonomous Landing of a Rotorcraft Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in a Non cooperative Environment written by Dale D. Rowley and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landing a rotorcraft unmanned aerial vehicle (RUAV) without human supervision is a capability that would significantly broaden the usefulness of UAVs. The benefits are even greater if the functionality is expanded to involve landing sites with unknown terrain and a lack of GPS or other positioning aids. Examples of these types of non-cooperative environments could range from remote mountainous regions to an urban building rooftop or a cluttered parking lot.

Download or read book Vision Based Systemsfor UAV Applications written by Aleksander Nawrat and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-12-06 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph is motivated by a significant number of vision based algorithms for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) that were developed during research and development projects. Vision information is utilized in various applications like visual surveillance, aim systems, recognition systems, collision-avoidance systems and navigation. This book presents practical applications, examples and recent challenges in these mentioned application fields. The aim of the book is to create a valuable source of information for researchers and constructors of solutions utilizing vision from UAV. Scientists, researchers and graduate students involved in computer vision, image processing, data fusion, control algorithms, mechanics, data mining, navigation and IC can find many valuable, useful and practical suggestions and solutions. The latest challenges for vision based systems are also presented.

Download or read book Autonomous Navigation and Deployment of UAVs for Communication Surveillance and Delivery written by Hailong Huang and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autonomous Navigation and Deployment of UAVs for Communication, Surveillance and Delivery Authoritative resource offering coverage of communication, surveillance, and delivery problems for teams of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) Autonomous Navigation and Deployment of UAVs for Communication, Surveillance and Delivery studies various elements of deployment of networks of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base stations for providing communication to ground users in disaster areas, covering problems like ground traffic monitoring, surveillance of environmental disaster areas (e.g. brush fires), using UAVs in rescue missions, converting UAV video surveillance, and more. The work combines practical problems, implementable and computationally efficient algorithms to solve these problems, and mathematically rigorous proofs of each algorithm’s convergence and performance. One such example provided by the authors is a novel biologically inspired motion camouflage algorithm to covert video surveillance of moving targets by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). All autonomous navigation and deployment algorithms developed in the book are computationally efficient, easily implementable in engineering practice, and based only on limited information on other UAVs of each and the environment. Sample topics discussed in the work include: Deployment of UAV base stations for communication, especially with regards to maximizing coverage and minimizing interference Deployment of UAVs for surveillance of ground areas and targets, including surveillance of both flat and uneven areas Navigation of UAVs for surveillance of moving areas and targets, including disaster areas and ground traffic monitoring Autonomous UAV navigation for covert video surveillance, offering extensive coverage of optimization-based navigation Integration of UAVs and public transportation vehicles for parcel delivery, covering both one-way and round trips Professionals in navigation and deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles, along with researchers, engineers, scientists in intersecting fields, can use Autonomous Navigation and Deployment of UAVs for Communication, Surveillance and Delivery to gain general knowledge on the subject along with practical, precise, and proven algorithms that can be deployed in a myriad of practical situations.

Download or read book Quad Rotorcraft Control written by Luis Rodolfo García Carrillo and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-08-12 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quad Rotorcraft Control develops original control methods for the navigation and hovering flight of an autonomous mini-quad-rotor robotic helicopter. These methods use an imaging system and a combination of inertial and altitude sensors to localize and guide the movement of the unmanned aerial vehicle relative to its immediate environment. The history, classification and applications of UAVs are introduced, followed by a description of modelling techniques for quad-rotors and the experimental platform itself. A control strategy for the improvement of attitude stabilization in quad-rotors is then proposed and tested in real-time experiments. The strategy, based on the use low-cost components and with experimentally-established robustness, avoids drift in the UAV’s angular position by the addition of an internal control loop to each electronic speed controller ensuring that, during hovering flight, all four motors turn at almost the same speed. The quad-rotor’s Euler angles being very close to the origin, other sensors like GPS or image-sensing equipment can be incorporated to perform autonomous positioning or trajectory-tracking tasks. Two vision-based strategies, each designed to deal with a specific kind of mission, are introduced and separately tested. The first stabilizes the quad-rotor over a landing pad on the ground; it extracts the 3-dimensional position using homography estimation and derives translational velocity by optical flow calculation. The second combines colour-extraction and line-detection algorithms to control the quad-rotor’s 3-dimensional position and achieves forward velocity regulation during a road-following task. In order to estimate the translational-dynamical characteristics of the quad-rotor (relative position and translational velocity) as they evolve within a building or other unstructured, GPS-deprived environment, imaging, inertial and altitude sensors are combined in a state observer. The text give the reader a current view of the problems encountered in UAV control, specifically those relating to quad-rotor flying machines and it will interest researchers and graduate students working in that field. The vision-based control strategies presented help the reader to a better understanding of how an imaging system can be used to obtain the information required for performance of the hovering and navigation tasks ubiquitous in rotored UAV operation.

Download or read book Vision based Autonomous Landing and Nighttime Trajectory Estimation of Quadrotors written by Yang Liu and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The agility and aerial view of drones can bring huge benefits to military, industrial and commercial fields. In recent years, huge improvements have been made in drone navigation technology. However, little effort has been put in drone navigation at night. This thesis is a cornerstone towards autonomous navigation for quadrotors at night. In the first part of the thesis, an vision-based autonomous landing program is implemented. It allows drones to land on a movable charging platform for longer battery life. This process provides a reliable solution with small error. It can also be transferred from grayscale camera to thermal camera in our future research, making long term autonomous task possible under poor light conditions. In the second part of this thesis, an optical flow based trajectory estimation program is implemented on thermal camera. This method can stablize a drone's position with more accuracy than GPS can in dark environment"--Author's abstract.

Download or read book Advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles written by Kimon P. Valavanis and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-02-26 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past decade has seen tremendous interest in the production and refinement of unmanned aerial vehicles, both fixed-wing, such as airplanes and rotary-wing, such as helicopters and vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. This book provides a diversified survey of research and development on small and miniature unmanned aerial vehicles of both fixed and rotary wing designs. From historical background to proposed new applications, this is the most comprehensive reference yet.

Download or read book Field and Service Robotics written by Christian Laugier and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-04-24 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This books presents the results of the 6th edition of "Field and Service Robotics" FSR03, held in Chamonix, France, July 2007. The conference provided a forum for researchers, professionals and robot manufacturers to exchange up-to-date technical knowledge and experience. This book offers a collection of a broad range of topics including: Underwater Robots and Systems, Autonomous Navigation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, and Climbing Robotics.

Download or read book Selected papers from the 2nd International Symposium on UAVs Reno U S A June 8 10 2009 written by Kimon P. Valavanis and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last decade, signi?cant changes have occurred in the ?eld of vehicle motion planning, and for UAVs in particular. UAV motion planning is especially dif?cult due to several complexities not considered by earlier planning strategies: the - creased importance of differential constraints, atmospheric turbulence which makes it impossible to follow a pre-computed plan precisely, uncertainty in the vehicle state, and limited knowledge about the environment due to limited sensor capabilities. These differences have motivated the increased use of feedback and other control engineering techniques for motion planning. The lack of exact algorithms for these problems and dif?culty inherent in characterizing approximation algorithms makes it impractical to determine algorithm time complexity, completeness, and even soundness. This gap has not yet been addressed by statistical characterization of experimental performance of algorithms and benchmarking. Because of this overall lack of knowledge, it is dif?cult to design a guidance system, let alone choose the algorithm. Throughout this paper we keep in mind some of the general characteristics and requirements pertaining to UAVs. A UAV is typically modeled as having velocity and acceleration constraints (and potentially the higher-order differential constraints associated with the equations of motion), and the objective is to guide the vehicle towards a goal through an obstacle ?eld. A UAV guidance problem is typically characterized by a three-dimensional problem space, limited information about the environment, on-board sensors with limited range, speed and acceleration constraints, and uncertainty in vehicle state and sensor data.

Download or read book Unmanned Rotorcraft Systems written by Guowei Cai and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unmanned Rotorcraft Systems explores the research and development of fully-functional miniature UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) rotorcraft, and provides a complete treatment of the design of autonomous miniature rotorcraft UAVs. The unmanned system is an integration of advanced technologies developed in communications, computing, and control areas, and is an excellent testing ground for trialing and implementing modern control techniques. Included are detailed expositions of systematic hardware construction, software systems integration, aerodynamic modeling; and automatic flight control system design. Emphasis is placed on the cooperative control and flight formation of multiple UAVs, vision-based ground target tracking, and landing on moving platforms. Other issues such as the development of GPS-less indoor micro aerial vehicles and vision-based navigation are also discussed in depth: utilizing the vision-based system for accomplishing ground target tracking, attacking and landing, cooperative control and flight formation of multiple unmanned rotorcraft; and future research directions on the related areas.

Download or read book Autonomous Flying Robots written by Kenzo Nonami and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-09-15 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advance in robotics has boosted the application of autonomous vehicles to perform tedious and risky tasks or to be cost-effective substitutes for their - man counterparts. Based on their working environment, a rough classi cation of the autonomous vehicles would include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), - manned ground vehicles (UGVs), autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), and autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs). UAVs, UGVs, AUVs, and ASVs are called UVs (unmanned vehicles) nowadays. In recent decades, the development of - manned autonomous vehicles have been of great interest, and different kinds of autonomous vehicles have been studied and developed all over the world. In part- ular, UAVs have many applications in emergency situations; humans often cannot come close to a dangerous natural disaster such as an earthquake, a ood, an active volcano, or a nuclear disaster. Since the development of the rst UAVs, research efforts have been focused on military applications. Recently, however, demand has arisen for UAVs such as aero-robotsand ying robotsthat can be used in emergency situations and in industrial applications. Among the wide variety of UAVs that have been developed, small-scale HUAVs (helicopter-based UAVs) have the ability to take off and land vertically as well as the ability to cruise in ight, but their most importantcapability is hovering. Hoveringat a point enables us to make more eff- tive observations of a target. Furthermore, small-scale HUAVs offer the advantages of low cost and easy operation.

Download or read book An Invitation to 3 D Vision written by Yi Ma and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-11-06 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces the geometry of 3-D vision, that is, the reconstruction of 3-D models of objects from a collection of 2-D images. It details the classic theory of two view geometry and shows that a more proper tool for studying the geometry of multiple views is the so-called rank consideration of the multiple view matrix. It also develops practical reconstruction algorithms and discusses possible extensions of the theory.

Download or read book Autonomous Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles written by Victor Becerra and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2019-06-24 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being increasingly used in different applications in both military and civilian domains. These applications include surveillance, reconnaissance, remote sensing, target acquisition, border patrol, infrastructure monitoring, aerial imaging, industrial inspection, and emergency medical aid. Vehicles that can be considered autonomous must be able to make decisions and react to events without direct intervention by humans. Although some UAVs are able to perform increasingly complex autonomous manoeuvres, most UAVs are not fully autonomous; instead, they are mostly operated remotely by humans. To make UAVs fully autonomous, many technological and algorithmic developments are still required. For instance, UAVs will need to improve their sensing of obstacles and subsequent avoidance. This becomes particularly important as autonomous UAVs start to operate in civilian airspaces that are occupied by other aircraft. The aim of this volume is to bring together the work of leading researchers and practitioners in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles with a common interest in their autonomy. The contributions that are part of this volume present key challenges associated with the autonomous control of unmanned aerial vehicles, and propose solution methodologies to address such challenges, analyse the proposed methodologies, and evaluate their performance.

Download or read book Computer Vision Based Navigation System for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles written by Frederick J. Anders and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presented at APPLIED MACHINE VISION CONFERENCE '92, June 1-4, 1992, Atlanta, GA.

Download or read book Autonomous Navigation and Teleoperation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Monocular Vision written by Diego Alberto Mercado-Ravell and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present document addresses, theoretically and experimentally, the most relevant topics for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in autonomous and semi-autonomous navigation. According with the multidisciplinary nature of the studied problems, a wide range of techniques and theories are covered in the fields of robotics, automatic control, computer science, computer vision and embedded systems, among others. As part of this thesis, two different experimental platforms were developed in order to explore and evaluate various theories and techniques of interest for autonomous navigation. The first prototype is a quadrotor specially designed for outdoor applications and was fully developed in our lab. The second testbed is composed by a non expensive commercial quadrotor kind AR. Drone, wireless connected to a ground station equipped with the Robot Operating System (ROS), and specially intended to test computer vision algorithms and automatic control strategies in an easy, fast and safe way. In addition, this work provides a study of data fusion techniques looking to enhance the UAVs pose estimation provided by commonly used sensors. Two strategies are evaluated in particular, an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) and a Particle Filter (PF). Both estimators are adapted for the system under consideration, taking into account noisy measurements of the UAV position, velocity and orientation. Simulations show the performance of the developed algorithms while adding noise from real GPS (Global Positioning System) measurements. Safe and accurate navigation for either autonomous trajectory tracking or haptic teleoperation of quadrotors is presented as well. A second order Sliding Mode (2-SM) control algorithm is used to track trajectories while avoiding frontal collisions in autonomous flight. The time-scale separation of the translational and rotational dynamics allows us to design position controllers by giving desired references in the roll and pitch angles, which is suitable for quadrotors equipped with an internal attitude controller. The 2-SM control allows adding robustness to the closed-loop system. A Lyapunov based analysis probes the system stability. Vision algorithms are employed to estimate the pose of the vehicle using only a monocular SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) fused with inertial measurements. Distance to potential obstacles is detected and computed using the sparse depth map from the vision algorithm. For teleoperation tests, a haptic device is employed to feedback information to the pilot about possible collisions, by exerting opposite forces. The proposed strategies are successfully tested in real-time experiments, using a low-cost commercial quadrotor. Also, conception and development of a Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) able to safely interact with human users by following them autonomously, is achieved in the present work. Once a face is detected by means of a Haar cascade classifier, it is tracked applying a Kalman Filter (KF), and an estimation of the relative position with respect to the face is obtained at a high rate. A linear Proportional Derivative (PD) controller regulates the UAV's position in order to keep a constant distance to the face, employing as well the extra available information from the embedded UAV's sensors. Several experiments were carried out through different conditions, showing good performance even under disadvantageous scenarios like outdoor flight, being robust against illumination changes, wind perturbations, image noise and the presence of several faces on the same image. Finally, this thesis deals with the problem of implementing a safe and fast transportation system using an UAV kind quadrotor with a cable suspended load. The objective consists in transporting the load from one place to another, in a fast way and with minimum swing in the cable.

Download or read book A COMPUTER VISION BASED NAVIGATION SYSTEM FOR AN UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE written by FREDERICK J. ANDERS and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Stochastically Optimized Monocular Vision based Navigation and Guidance written by Yoko Watanabe and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The objective of this thesis is to design a relative navigation and guidance system for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for vision-based control applications. The vision-based navigation, guidance and control has been one of the most focused on research topics for the automation of UAVs. This is because in nature, birds and insects use vision as the exclusive sensor for object detection and navigation. In particular, this thesis studies the monocular vision-based navigation and guidance. Since 2-D vision-based measurements are nonlinear with respect to the 3-D relative states, an extended Kalman filter (EKF) is applied in the navigation system design. The EKF-based navigation system is integrated with a real-time image processing algorithm and is tested in simulations and flight tests. The first closed-loop vision-based formation flight has been achieved. In addition, vision-based 3-D terrain recovery was performed in simulations. A vision-based obstacle avoidance problem is specially addressed in this thesis. A navigation and guidance system is designed for a UAV to achieve a mission of waypoint tracking while avoiding unforeseen stationary obstacles by using vision information. A 3-D collision criterion is established by using a collision-cone approach. A minimum-effort guidance (MEG) law is applied for a guidance design, and it is shown that the control effort can be reduced by using the MEG-based guidance instead of a conventional guidance law. The system is evaluated in a 6 DoF flight simulation and also in a flight test. For monocular vision-based control problems, vision-based estimation performance highly depends on the relative motion of the vehicle with respect to the target. Therefore, this thesis aims to derive an optimal guidance law to achieve a given mission under the condition of using the EKF-based relative navigation. Stochastic optimization is formulated to minimize the expected cost including the guidance error and the control effort. A suboptimal guidance law is derived based on an idea of the one-step-ahead (OSA) optimization. Simulation results show that the suggested guidance law significantly improves the guidance performance. Furthermore, the OSA optimization is generalized as the n-step-ahead optimization for an arbitrary number of n, and their optimality and computational cost are investigated.