Vision aided navigation for unmanned helicopters

Author

Katzourakis, Diomidis ; Vitzilaios, Nikos I. ; Tsourveloudis, Nikos C.

Author_Institution

Intell. Syst. & Robot. Lab., Tech. Univ. of Crete, Chania, Greece

fYear

2009

fDate

24-26 June 2009

Firstpage

1245

Lastpage

1250

Abstract

The development of a vision system to aid the autonomous navigation of an unmanned helicopter, primarily based on inertial sensors and GPS data, is presented. An unmanned helicopter has been equipped with appropriate sensors and a vision system fitted on a custom pan-tilt mechanism. Robust software, based on the Open Computer Vision Library (OpenCV), has been developed for handling images and video from a camera. Our implementation involves real time object recognition, histogram matching for real time video streaming, pattern matching and object tracking. Software implemented in C++ interacts with Matlab in order to aid the autonomous navigation of the helicopter.

Keywords

aerospace robotics; control engineering computing; helicopters; mobile robots; object recognition; path planning; pattern matching; robot vision; telerobotics; C++; GPS data; Open Computer Vision Library; autonomous navigation; histogram matching; inertial sensors; object recognition; object tracking; pan-tilt mechanism; pattern matching; real time video streaming; unmanned helicopters; vision aided navigation; vision system; Aircraft navigation; Cameras; Computer vision; Global Positioning System; Helicopters; Machine vision; Pattern matching; Robustness; Sensor systems; Software libraries;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Control and Automation, 2009. MED '09. 17th Mediterranean Conference on

Conference_Location

Thessaloniki

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-4684-1

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-4685-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/MED.2009.5164717

Filename

5164717