Quadrotor UAV Control for Vision-based Moving Target Tracking Task

The problem of stand-off tracking of a moving target using a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based on vision-sensing is investigated. A PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) controller is implemented for attitude stabilization of the quadrotor. An LQG-based (Linear-Quadratic-Gaussian) control law is designed and implemented for position control of the quadrotor for a moving target tracking task. A novel vision-based estimation algorithm is developed, enabling estimation of quadrotor's position, altitude and yaw relative to the target based on limited information about the target. Two image processing algorithms are implemented and compared for the task of feature detection and feature tracking in a series of images. Image processing algorithms are integrated with quadrotor control and experiments are performed to validate proposed control and estimation approaches.