Vision Guided Landing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

In this paper, we investigate the problem of using computer vision as a sensor to control the landing of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The vision problem we address is a differential version of the structure from motion problem for a planar scene, where one uses image velocities to recover the motion of the camera and the orientation of a (landing) plane. We propose a new estimation scheme for solving this problem. The autonomous landing task we address is for a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft equipped with an on-board camera. Since there is an inherent scale ambiguity when using vision as a sensor for state estimation, we design a vision based landing controller which is robust to this unknown scale. We present simulation results for both the proposed vision algorithm and the landing controller. Keywords: unmanned aerial vehicle, autonomous landing, structure from motion 1 Introduction Our objective is to use computer vision as a sensor to control the landing of a ..