Monocular camera based guiding and positioning strategy for docking of a distributed swarm flight robot

This paper proposes a novel positioning and guiding strategy based on a monocular camera for DSFR (Distributed Swarm Flight Robot, DSFR) which is undergoing research in School of Mechanical Engineering and Automaton, Beihang University. DSFR is able to mobile, dock with each other and then fly under distributed control. In this paper, we primarily focus on the positioning and guiding method adopted in autonomous self-assembling and docking proceedings, which basically employs a CMOS camera and three RGB LEDs. With strategic and delicate disposition of LEDs in 3-dimension space, potential concerned information can be extracted from the image, and it is obviously an interesting and meaningful work to find an effective strategy using these information to enhance robot performance in autonomous docking and self-assembly. A simple strategy is brought out in this paper and meanwhile demonstrated and verified with DSFR.