Visual tracking with a small scale aircraft

This paper presents experimental results of localization and tracking of on-going research work with a small scale aircraft. The proposed architecture is based on the communication between an embedded smartphone and a ground station. Besides the standard sensors provided by the smartphone such as an accelerometer, gyroscope, GPS and camera, special flight related sensors were used, in example the pitot tube. By means of data fusion based on available sensors and the data extracted from image processing, static and dynamic object tracking was performed both in offline and online experiments. The tracking was performed using an extended Kalman filter. A computer aided system identification was performed to compute the transfer function along the horizontal axes of the UAV intended for further design of the corresponding stabilization controller.