A Spatial Localization and Attitude Estimation System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using a Single Dynamic Vision Sensor

This paper presents a three-dimensional (3D) localization and attitude estimation system to track a Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) using a single camera without prior knowledge of the environment. The hardware system consists of a Dynamic Vision Sensing (DVS) camera, a circle-shaped blinking marker made by Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs), and a base station computer. The algorithm for spatial localization and attitude estimation includes a temporal video filter, triangulation-based location and attitude estimation, and 3D real-time plotting with a graphical user interface (GUI). The temporal video filter processes the image stream from the DVS camera to identify the frequency of the marker and removes the background image. The circle-shaped marker creates an ellipse in the image, whose diameter length and angles are utilized for calculating the location and attitude of the UAV, which offers a low-computing overhead. The proposed system has been evaluated in hardware flight testing. The results are compared with the benchmark data from both the infrared motion capturing system for localization and the on-board inertial measurement units of the UAV for attitude estimation. The accuracy and detection range surpasses similar state-of-the-art systems. The proposed method provides a simple yet accurate solution for tracking the location and attitude of a UAV.