Visually servoed trajectory tracking of quadrotors with the kinematic model

The visually servoed trajectory tracking of quadrotors has attracted many academic researchers over the past decade, and numerous controllers are proposed for this challenging problem. The trajectory tracking controller proposed in this paper follows the Position Based Visual Servoing (PBVS) paradigm. Most of the PBVS controllers, if not all, are implemented assuming that the position of the quadrotor has been accurately recovered with an independent estimator. Therefore the rigorous trajectory tracking stability cannot be promised due to the separation principle does not hold for the general nonlinear systems. Accordingly, a new PBVS controller is proposed in this paper for the trajectory tracking of quadrotors by embedding a novel adaptive estimator into this new controller to estimate the position of the quadrotor online. It is proved by Lyapunov theory that the proposed adaptive PBVS controller gives rise to the asymptotic trajectory tracking and the convergence of the estimated position to the actual one. An experiment is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.