A Method to Estimate Relative Position and Attitude of Cooperative UAVs Based on Monocular Vision

In this paper, a method to estimate the relative position and attitude of cooperative unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) based on monocular vision measurement is proposed. The camera imaging model and the solution of P4P problem are adopted to realize the transformation between body coordinate system and image coordinate system. Deductions help to prove the feasibility of the method and the uniqueness of solution. Furthermore, different image processing methods for extracting the center feature points are applied to reduce error. Finally, the semi-physical simulation shows that the method proposed in this paper could accurately estimate the relative position and attitude between cooperative UAVs.