Autonomous navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles guided by visual features of the terrain

In this work we present an autonomous control scheme for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), based on pure visual information obtained from the UAV on-board camera. The objective of the system is to visually follow some characteristics of terrain, specifically the existing boundary between two distinct areas, using an image processing pipeline. The motivation of this work is to provide a base system to control a UAV, over a border identified from any segmentation areas defined by the particular application of the UAV. With this reason in mind, an additional contribution is to provide a modular publisher/subscriber control scheme which can be easily reused for any particular application. The present work has been tested in an indoor environment, and its performance evaluated versus human users, measuring the orientation and distance from target.