Following a quadrotor with another quadrotor using onboard vision

We consider a leader-following problem with two flying robots with different sensor configurations. The follower is equipped with a camera to detect the leader robot. The platforms are based on the low-cost Parrot AR. Drone quadrotor modified for on-board sensing and computing. Our approach relies on detecting artificial passive markers on the leader quadrotor to compute the relative distance between the vehicles. We solve the perspective-n-point problem using an algorithm based on the inscribed angle theorem that runs efficiently on resource-limited platforms. We validate the position estimation algorithm and leader-following controllers with autonomously flown figures.