A visual servoing approach for tracking features in urban areas using an autonomous helicopter

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in civilian and domestic applications is highly demanding, requiring a high-level of capability from the vehicles. This work addresses the design and implementation of a vision-based feature tracker for an autonomous helicopter. Using vision in the control loop allows estimating the position and velocity of a set of features with respect to the helicopter. The helicopter is then autonomously guided to track these features (in this case windows in an urban environment) in real time. The results obtained from flight trials in a real world scenario demonstrate that the algorithm for tracking features in an urban environment, used for visual servoing of an autonomous helicopter is reliable and robust.