Visual servoing for a scale model autonomous helicopter

A control design to stabilise a reduced scale autonomous helicopter equipped with a camera is presented. The proposed algorithm is motivated by recent work in image-based visual servoing control for under-actuated dynamic systems. This work is extended by considering models that contain weakly nonminimum phase zero dynamics. This is an important class of systems since an offset between the camera and the centre of mass for a typical ´dynamic´ autonomous vehicle will result in zero dynamics occurring in the image dynamics. In this paper we propose a simplified model of dynamics of the helicopter and show that by placing some constraints in the choice of the position of the camera we can minimise the effect of the zero dynamics.