Autonomous flight control for RC helicopter using camera image

In recent years, there are a lot of research on the subject of autonomous flight control using a small radio control helicopter. An autonomous flight control system for a RC helicopter needs to get three dimensional position and attitude, methods using a GPS/IMU and various sensors, and methods using input images from camera have been investigated. However, usable environments are limited according to selection of sensors. On the other hands, methods using input camera images need to setup many artificial markers otherwise an estimation error will accumulate. In this research, we propose a RC helicopter position and attitude estimation method for flight control in a wide area which does not require sensors and many artificial markers by detecting natural feature points from camera images. In this paper, we report about the measurement of three dimensional position and attitude of the RC helicopter and the feature point extraction.