Simple Autonomous Flight Control of a UAV Flying Above a UGV Using Onboard Camera Vision

An autonomous flight control method of UAV(: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) which flying just above the UGV(: Unmanned Ground Vehicle) using only the information of the onboard camera of UAV is proposed in this paper. In the conventional research, motion capture system, GPS, and laser range finder are often used to measure the position and posture of UAV. Although the conventional measurement system is effective in certain conditions and limited environments, it is not always applicable outdoors. There have also been researched about the cooperation of UAV and UVG, but much previous research, its effectiveness was shown in by numerical simulation or experiments using many sensors. By using our proposed system, it is possible to select a feature point on the UGV placed on the ground by using only a UAV onboard camera, and to fly the UAV just above the UGV. Besides, if the UGV moves along a trajectory, UAV can fly above the UGV. In our experiment, we use ROS for an image processing and calculation of control inputs. To operate the UAV automatically, we apply a simple PID control method and its gains are individually adjusted. The effectiveness of our proposed method is shown by experiment.