Onboard Visual Control of a Quadcopter MAV performing a Landing Task: on a Platform of Unknown Size and Location

Vision based control allows Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) to move autonomously in GPS-denied environments, for example in indoor applications. An open issue in this field is landing on an unknown platform. The difficulty in visual control w.r.t. such an unknown platform, is a lack of scale. Without knowledge of the scale of offsets and object sizes (without height knowledge from GPS) it is difficult to determine an appropriate response from the controller. A control algorithm is designed to fit these requirements using an adaptation of an optical flow divergence based landing scheme, combined with an Image Based Visual Servoing approach applied to features in the Virtual Camera. The approach leads to satisfactory behavior in Gazebo simulations. It results in a robust controller for a range of starting heights and divergence settings.Aerospace Engineerin