Hyperion: A Robust Drone-based Target Tracking System

Recent advances in mobile computing and embedded systems have had a transformative impact in the field of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs). These advances have unlocked a great number of new capabilities ranging from realtime machine learning for detection and tracking of targets, and autonomous intelligent control for mission-critical trajectory planning. This paper introduces Hyperion, a robust detect, track and follow algorithm for UASs, leveraging and integrating various computer vision techniques and a combination of two proportional integral derivative (PID) controllers for following a moving vehicle. The proposed system is evaluated under real settings using off-the-shelf hardware and an elaborated comparison is made with a variety of state-of-the-art trackers available in the OpenCV library.