Optimal Control and Coordination of Small UAVs for Vision-based Target Tracking

Download or read book Optimal Control and Coordination of Small UAVs for Vision-based Target Tracking written by Steven Andrew Provencio Quintero and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are relatively inexpensive mobile sensing platforms capable of reliably and autonomously performing numerous tasks, including mapping, search and rescue, surveillance and tracking, and real-time monitoring. The general problem of interest that we address is that of using small, fixed-wing UAVs to perform vision-based target tracking, which entails that one or more camera-equipped UAVs is responsible for autonomously tracking a moving ground target. In the single-UAV setting, the underactuated UAV must maintain proximity and visibility of an unpredictable ground target while having a limited sensing region. We provide solutions from two different vantage points. The first regards the problem as a two-player zero-sum game and the second as a stochastic optimal control problem. The resulting control policies have been successfully field-tested, thereby verifying the efficacy of both approaches while highlighting the advantages of one approach over the other.