Vision-Based Range Regulation of a Leader-Follower Formation

This brief describes a single-vehicle tracking algorithm relying on active contours for target extraction and an extended Kalman filter for relative position estimation. The primary difficulty lies in the estimation and regulation of range using monocular vision. The work represents a first step towards treating the problem of the control of several unmanned vehicles flying in formation using only local visual information. In particular, allowing only onboard passive sensing of the external environment, we seek to study the achievable closed-loop performance under this model.