Visual Tracking Control of Aerial Robotic Systems with Adaptive Depth Estimation

This paper describes a visual tracking control law of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for monitoring of structures and maintenance of bridges. It presents a control law based on computer vision for quasi-stationary flights above a planar target. The first part of the UAV’s mission is the navigation from an initial position to a final position to define a desired trajectory in an unknown 3D environment. The proposed method uses the homography matrix computed from the visual information and derives, using backstepping techniques, an adaptive nonlinear tracking control law allowing the effective tracking and depth estimation. The depth represents the desired distance separating the camera from the target.