Adaptive Visual Servoing of Micro Aerial Vehicle with Switched System Model for Obstacle Avoidance

In this paper, a vision based adaptive controller is proposed for the obstacle avoidance of a micro aerial vehicle (MAV) by using the optical flow information. In order to employ the optical flow for indicating the distance between the MAV and surrounding, the multi-thread processing algorithm is proposed to reliably obtain the optical flow information uniformly diffused in the whole image frame. The MAV system is treated as a switched system while manipulating the different modes during the obstacle avoidance task. Based on the desired flying direction of obstacle avoidance obtained by the optical flow estimation, we design an adaptive controller such that the desired trajectory can be tracked under different switching modes. The simulations present the tracking response of the adaptive controller of a switched system, and the experiments of the overall system validate the collision-avoidance performance of the MAV.