Motion Estimation by Hybrid Optical Flow Technology for UAV Landing in an Unvisited Area
The capability of landing on previously unvisited areas is a fundamental challenge for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) In this paper, we developed a vision based motion estimation as an aid to improve landing performance. As an alternative to the common scenarios accompanying by external infrastructures or well defined marker, the proposed hybrid framework can successfully land on a new area without any prior information about guiding marks. The implementation was based on the optical flow technique associated with a multi scale strategy to overcome the decreasing field of view during the UAV descending. Compared with a commercial Global Positioning System (GPS) through a sequence of flight trials, the vision aided scheme can effectively minimize the possible sensing error, thus, leading to a more accurate result. Moreover, this work has potential to integrate the fast growing image learning process and yields more practical versatility for UAV applications in the future.
Sensors