Motion Estimation by Hybrid Optical Flow Technology for UAV Landing in an Unvisited Area

The capability of landing on previously unvisited areas is a fundamental challenge for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In this paper, we developed a vision-based motion estimation as an aid to improve landing performance. As an alternative to the common scenarios accompanying by external infrastru...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hsiu-Wen Cheng, Tsung-Lin Chen, Chung-Hao Tien
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2019-03-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/6/1380
Description
Summary:The capability of landing on previously unvisited areas is a fundamental challenge for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In this paper, we developed a vision-based motion estimation as an aid to improve landing performance. As an alternative to the common scenarios accompanying by external infrastructures or well-defined marker, the proposed hybrid framework can successfully land on a new area without any prior information about guiding marks. The implementation was based on the optical flow technique associated with a multi-scale strategy to overcome the decreasing field-of-view during the UAV descending. Compared with a commercial Global Positioning System (GPS) through a sequence of flight trials, the vision-aided scheme can effectively minimize the possible sensing error, thus, leading to a more accurate result. Moreover, this work has potential to integrate the fast-growing image learning process and yields more practical versatility for UAV applications in the future.
ISSN:1424-8220