A Vision-Based Guidance System for UAV Navigation and Safe Landing using Natural Landmarks

  • Authors:

  • A. Cesetti;E. Frontoni;A. Mancini;P. Zingaretti;S. Longhi

  • Affiliations:

  • Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Gestionale e dell'Automazione, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy;Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Gestionale e dell'Automazione, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy;Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Gestionale e dell'Automazione, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy;Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Gestionale e dell'Automazione, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy;Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Gestionale e dell'Automazione, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In this paper a vision-based approach for guidance and safe landing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is proposed. The UAV is required to navigate from an initial to a final position in a partially known environment. The guidance system allows a remote user to define target areas from a high resolution aerial or satellite image to determine either the waypoints of the navigation trajectory or the landing area. A feature-based image-matching algorithm finds the natural landmarks and gives feedbacks to an onboard, hierarchical, behaviour-based control system for autonomous navigation and landing. Two algorithms for safe landing area detection are also proposed, based on a feature optical flow analysis. The main novelty is in the vision-based architecture, extensively tested on a helicopter, which, in particular, does not require any artificial landmark (e.g., helipad). Results show the appropriateness of the vision-based approach, which is robust to occlusions and light variations.