UAV Landing Based on the Optical Flow Videonavigation

Abstract

An automatic landing of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a non-trivial task requiringa solution of a variety of technical and computational problems. The most important is the precisedetermination of altitude, especially at the final stage of approaching to the earth. With currentaltimeters, the magnitude of measurement errors at the final phase of the descent may be unacceptablyhigh for constructing an algorithm for controlling the landing manoeuvre. Therefore, it is desirableto have an additional sensor, which makes possible to estimate the height above the surface of therunway. It is possible to estimate all linear and angular UAV velocities simultaneously with thehelp of so-called optical flow (OF), determined by the sequence of images recorded by an onboardcamera, however in pixel scale. To transform them into the real metrical values it is necessary toknow the current flight altitude and the camera angular position values. The critical feature of theOF is its susceptibility to the camera resolution and the shift rate of the observed scene. During thedescent phase of flight, these parameters change at least one hundred times together with the altitude.Therefore, for reliable application of the OF one needs to coordinate the shooting parameters withthe current altitude. However, in case of the altimeter fault presence, the altitude is also still to beestimated with the aid of the OF, so one needs to have another tool for the camera control. One of thepossible and straightforward ways is the camera resolution change by pixels averaging in computerpart which performed in coordination with theoretically estimated and measured OF velocity. Thearticle presents results of such algorithms testing from real video sequences obtained in flights withdifferent approaches to the runway with simultaneous recording of telemetry and video data.