Autonomous Target Tracking of UAV Using High-Speed Visual Feedback

Most current unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) primarily use a global positioning system (GPS) and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) for position estimation. However, compared to birds and insects, the abilities of current UAVs to recognize the environment are not sufficient. To achieve autonomous flight of UAVs, like birds, the UAVs should be able to process and respond to information from their surrounding environment immediately. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a direct visual servoing system for UAVs, using an onboard high-speed monocular camera. There are two advantages of this system. First, the high image sampling rates help to improve the ability to recognize the environment. Second, the issue of control latency can be effectively solved because the position control signals are transmitted to the flight controller directly. In the experiment, the UAV could recognize a target at update rates of about 350 Hz, and a target tracking task was successfully realized.