Model Predictive Spherical Image-Based Visual Servoing On $SO(3)$ for Aggressive Aerial Tracking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model predictive visual servoing approach on $SO(3)$ for aggressive aerial tracking with quadrotors, addressing robustness, visibility, and rotational compensation to enable stable, fast target tracking without localization.

Contribution

It proposes a novel spherical image feature representation on $SO(3)$ combined with NMPC and a new attitude-compensation scheme for robust, aggressive aerial tracking.

Findings

Successfully tracks fast-moving targets in real experiments

Maintains target visibility under large rotations

Operates without external localization systems

Abstract

This paper presents an image-based visual servo control (IBVS) method for a first-person-view (FPV) quadrotor to conduct aggressive aerial tracking. There are three major challenges to maneuvering an underactuated vehicle using IBVS: (i) finding a visual feature representation that is robust to large rotations and is suited to be an optimization variable; (ii) keeping the target visible without sacrificing the robot's agility; and (iii) compensating for the rotational effects in the detected features. We propose a complete design framework to address these problems. First, we employ a rotation on $SO(3)$ to represent a spherical image feature on $S^{2}$ to gain singularity-free and second-order differentiable properties. To ensure target visibility, we formulate the IBVS as a nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) problem with three constraints taken into account: the robot's physical limits, target visibility, and time-to-collision (TTC). Furthermore, we propose a novel attitude-compensation scheme to enable formulating the visibility constraint in the actual image plane instead of a virtual fix-orientation image plane. It guarantees that the visibility constraint is valid under large rotations. Extensive experimental results show that our method can track a fast-moving target stably and aggressively without the aid of a localization system.