Development of an unmanned aerial vehicle for rooftop landing and surveillance

This paper presents a novel solution for a typical small-scaled quad-rotor UAV to autonomously search for and land on a pre-designed marker placed on a rooftop and to observe a digit panel on the opposite building. The UAV is equipped with a downward-facing monocular camera for landing target detection and pose estimation, as well as a front-facing camera for digit panel observation and surveillance. The UAV navigates to the landing site based on GPS and transits to vision-guided navigation once the UAV identifies the targeted marker. The target searching and observation thread will take over once the UAV successfully lands on the rooftop. The presented vision-based navigation and detection algorithms were demonstrated with fully autonomous flight carried out during the competition IMAV 2014.