Quadrotor going through a window and landing: An image-based visual servo control approach

TL;DR

This paper presents an image-based visual servo control method enabling a quadrotor to safely navigate through a window and land on a target using only onboard cameras and IMU data, without explicit position or velocity measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a novel IBVS control approach for quadrotors that guarantees collision-free window crossing and smooth landing without direct position or velocity sensing.

Findings

Successful simulation results demonstrate effective navigation through a window.

Experimental tests confirm safe landing on the target plane.

Control laws ensure collision avoidance and smooth touchdown.

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of controlling a quadrotor to go through a window and land on a planar target, the landing pad, using an Image-Based Visual Servo (IBVS) controller that relies on sensing information from two on-board cameras and an IMU. The maneuver is divided into two stages: crossing the window and landing on the pad. For the first stage, a control law is proposed that guarantees that the vehicle will not collide with the wall containing the window and will go through the window with non-zero velocity along the direction orthogonal to the window, keeping at all times a safety distance with respect to the window edges. For the landing stage, the proposed control law ensures that the vehicle achieves a smooth touchdown, keeping at all time a positive height above the plane containing the landing pad. For control purposes, the centroid vectors provided by the combination of the spherical image measurements of a collection of landmarks (corners) for both the window and the landing pad are used as position measurement. The translational optical flow relative to the wall, window edges, and landing plane is used as velocity cue. To achieve the proposed objective, no direct measurements nor explicit estimate of position or velocity are required. Simulation and experimental results are provided to illustrate the performance of the presented controller.