Vision-based control of a quadrotor for perching on lines

We formulate the position-based visual servoing problem for a quadrotor equipped with a monocular camera and an IMU relying only on features on planes and lines in order to fly above and perch on arbitrarily oriented lines. We show that we are able to compute the orientation of an arbitrarily oriented line, the speed of the robot and its position with respect to the target line using two points at a known distance on the line. The direction of the velocity is derived from optical flow induced by features on a plane in the background Finally, we demonstrate fully autonomous flight and perching using a small 230 gram quadrotor with all the computations running on the robot.