Image-Based Visual Servoing of Quadrotors to Arbitrary Flight Targets

Visual servoing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has achieved satisfactory performance in fixed and planar motion targets. Due to highly coupled system dynamics and the sensitivity of the target image to aircraft attitude, the problem for chasing free-flying targets remains challenging. In this paper, a vision-based algorithm is designed for controlling an UAV while tracking an intruder flying arbitrarily in 3D space. Image-based visual servoing is used to design controllers that depend directly on errors in image plane. Specifically, a virtual camera approach is adopted to decouple the UAV dynamics by compensating the pitch and yaw, and an improved image error term is proposed to reduce the impact of the UAV rotation on error signals in the process of tracking, thus a simplified control design is achieved, and the stability of the visual servo system is guaranteed. Comparison and ablation experiments in both simulated and real environments are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.