Evaluation of Orientation Ambiguity and Detection Rate in April Tag and WhyCode
This addresses orientation reliability issues in fiducial markers for autonomous drone landing applications, but is incremental as it evaluates existing systems.
The paper evaluated April Tag and WhyCode fiducial systems for orientation ambiguity and detection rate on embedded hardware, finding they are suitable for autonomous drone landing in detection rate but may cause erroneous control signals due to orientation ambiguity.
Fiducial systems provide a computationally cheap way for mobile robots to estimate the pose of objects, or their own pose, using just a monocular camera. However, the orientation component of the pose of fiducial markers is unreliable, which can have destructive effects in autonomous drone landing on landing pads marked with fiducial markers. This paper evaluates the April Tag and WhyCode fiducial systems in terms of orientation ambiguity and detection rate on embedded hardware. We test 2 April Tag variants - 1 default and 1 custom - and 3 Whycode variants - 1 default and 2 custom. We determine that they are suitable for autonomous drone landing applications in terms of detection rate, but may generate erroneous control signals as a result of orientation ambiguity in the pose estimates.