Memorias de investigación
Ponencias en congresos:
Towards Autonomous Air-to-Air Refuelling for UAVs Using Visual Information
Año:2013

Áreas de investigación
  • Robots aéreos

Datos
Descripción
For the purposes of achieving Autonomous Air-to- Air Refuelling (AAAR) in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), this paper presents the use of a visual tracking algorithm based on direct methods and image registration techniques, with the aim of solving the drogue tracking problem in order to obtain vision-based relative position estimations of the aircrafts for the probe and drogue refuelling method. Proposed visionbased AAAR approaches to date have explored the use of features (such as corners, painted marks, or LEDs) to detect and estimate the relative motion of either the receiver or the tanker aircraft, with the drawback that sometimes this requires the installation of specific hardware on-board. Conversely, the strategy we propose to use does not require the installation of additional hardware on-board. The strategy is based on a hierarchical implementation of an image registration technique: the Inverse Compositional Image Alignment ICIA. Real images and real flight hardware (probe and drogue) are used to test the algorithm using a robotic testbed that simulates the motion of the aircrafts (the tanker and the receiver) during the refuelling task. Results show that the tracking algorithm is robust to fast motion, changes in appearance, and situations where part of the drogue is occluded or is outside of the field of view of the camera. Additionally, results show that robust position estimations at real-time frame rates are obtained, proving that the technique is fast enough to form the basis for automated aerial refuelling sensing capabilities.
Internacional
Si
Nombre congreso
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation ICRA 2013
Tipo de participación
960
Lugar del congreso
Karlsruhe, Germany
Revisores
Si
ISBN o ISSN
978-1-4673-5641-1
DOI
10.1109/ICRA.2013.6631404
Fecha inicio congreso
06/05/2013
Fecha fin congreso
10/05/2013
Desde la página
5756
Hasta la página
5762
Título de las actas
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation ICRA 2013

Esta actividad pertenece a memorias de investigación

Participantes
  • Autor: Carol Viviana Martinez Luna UPM
  • Autor: Thomas Richardson University of Bristol
  • Autor: Pascual Campoy Cervera UPM

Grupos de investigación, Departamentos, Centros e Institutos de I+D+i relacionados
  • Creador: Grupo de Investigación: Computer Vision
  • Departamento: Automática, Ingeniería Electrónica e Informática Industrial
  • Centro o Instituto I+D+i: Centro de Automática y Robótica (CAR). Centro Mixto UPM-CSIC