A robust vision system for a UAV transporting cargoes between moving platforms

Author

Shiyu Zhao ; Zhangyuan Hu ; Mingfeng Yin ; Ang, Kevin Z. Y. ; Peidong Liu ; Fei Wang ; Xiangxu Dong ; Feng Lin ; Chen, Ben M. ; Lee, Tong H.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Nat. Univ. of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

fYear

2014

fDate

28-30 July 2014

Firstpage

544

Lastpage

549

Abstract

Motivated by the 2013 International UAV Innovation Grand Prix (UAVGP), we design and implement a real-time vision system for an unmanned helicopter to transfer cargoes between two moving platforms fully autonomously. The key algorithms in the vision system include ellipse detection, ellipse tracking and single-circle-based pose estimation. Comprehensive experiments have verified the efficiency, accuracy and robustness of the algorithms. The developed vision system has helped us achieving a great success in UAVGP. Our team was ranked first in the final round competition.

Keywords

autonomous aerial vehicles; freight handling; helicopters; object detection; object tracking; pose estimation; robot vision; International UAV Innovation Grand Prix; UAVGP; cargo transportation; ellipse detection; ellipse tracking; real-time vision system; robust vision system; single-circle-based pose estimation; unmanned aerial vehicle; unmanned helicopter; Cameras; Estimation; Helicopters; Histograms; Machine vision; Robustness; Target tracking; Circle-based pose estimation; Ellipse detection; OpenCV; Unmanned aerial vehicle; Vision-based navigation;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Control Conference (CCC), 2014 33rd Chinese

Conference_Location

Nanjing

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ChiCC.2014.6896682

Filename

6896682