Stablization of an aerial robot for indoor environments using a vision-based approach

Aerial Robots are in major focus nowadays for security and surveillance purposes. The paper presents a vision-based novel approach using an on-ground marker using Laser diode to stabilize the orientation of quad-rotor under hovering condition for indoor environments. For this purpose, a Laser diode mounted at the inertial center of the quad-rotor is used to detect the disturbance rather than using a traditional Inertial Measurement Unit based approach. Ground images obtained from camera are binarized to locate the position of marker in order to estimate change in position. Affine transforms are then used to calculate roll, pitch and yaw, a Proportional-Derivative controller is then tuned using the calculated values to stabilize the aerial robot. The technique is simulated in Matlab Simulink environment. The technique shows promising results with average settling time of 0.9656 secs.