Visual navigation system for small unmanned aerial vehicles

Purpose - This paper aims to address three major issues in the development of a vision-based navigation system for small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which can be characterized as follows: technical constraints, robust image feature matching and an efficient and precise method for visual navigation. Design/methodology/approach - The authors present and evaluate methods for their solution such as wireless networked control, highly distinctive feature descriptors (HDF) and a visual odometry system. Findings - Proposed feature descriptors achieve significant improvements in computation time by detaching the explicit scale invariance of the widely used scale invariant feature transform. The feasibility of wireless networked real-time control for vision-based navigation is evaluated in terms of latency and data throughput. The visual odometry system uses a single camera to reconstruct the camera path and the structure of the environment, and achieved and error of 1.65 percent w.r.t total path length on a circular trajectory of 9.43 m. Originality/value - The originality/value lies in the contribution of the presented work to the solution of visual odometry for small unmanned aerial vehicles.