Real-time and Autonomous Detection of Helipad for Landing Quad-Rotors by Visual Servoing
This addresses the need for reliable, real-time autonomous landing systems for quad-rotors in practical applications, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing visual servoing techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of autonomously detecting helipads and landing quad-rotors in real-time, achieving this through a non-machine-learning method that operates on standard quad-rotor hardware with reduced computational requirements.
In this paper, we first present a method to autonomously detect helipads in real time. Our method does not rely on any machine-learning methods and as such is applicable in real-time on the computational capabilities of an average quad-rotor. After initial detection, we use image tracking methods to reduce the computational resource requirement further. Once the tracking starts our modified IBVS(Image-Based Visual Servoing) method starts publishing velocity to guide the quad-rotor onto the helipad. The modified IBVS scheme is designed for the four degrees-of-freedom of a quad-rotor and can land the quad-rotor in a specific orientation.