Pose Estimation of Leader Aircraft for Vision-based Formation Flight

This paper describes a vision-based only attitude estimation technique for the leader in the formation flight. The feature points in image obtained from the X-PLANE simulator are extracted by the SURF(Speed Up Robust Features) algorithm. We use POSIT(Pose from Orthography and Scaling with Iteration) algorithm to estimate attitude. Finally we verify that attitude estimation using vision only can yield small estimated error of .