Visual Servo Controllers for an UAV Tracking Vegetal Paths

Abstract

In the inspection and data collection of large areas as crop fields, where an aerial vehicle should follow an objects line accurately, autonomous flight is adesirable featurewith unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). To attain this objective, three visual servo controllers are proposed, one of them is position based and the other two are image based using inverse Jacobian and concepts of passivity respectively. All controllers are developed based on the kinematic model of the vehicle, and a dynamic compensation is designed to be added in cascade with the kinematic one. The performance of the control systems are compared through simulation results. The main contribution is the development of the image based controller using passivity properties of the system, the stability and robustness analysis and the comparative performance with other controllers when used for an UAV following vegetal lines. These comparative results are valuable to choose the appropriate driver for a specific application.