Helicopter guidance for vision-based tracking and landing on a moving ground target

The purpose of this paper is to present a proper guidance law for an UAV tracking and landing on a moving target with aid of on-board vision sensor. The image processing procedure extracts the target from the captured video and estimate the position and velocity of the target. With this information on image plane, we could calculate its position with relation to inertia frame. Using this geolocation information of the moving target and known UAV state information, we suggest dual-velocity guidance as a proper guidance law for approaching while tracking a moving target. The novel guidance gives velocity commands as a summation of the target velocity and the resultant line-of-sight guidance law proportional to the relative distance up to the target. Apart from above, a simple height commanding logic based on relative velocity has also been suggested. Suggested guidance law showed robustness and competent computational speed in the simulation for vision-based moving ground target tracking and landing for UAVs.