Videometric terminal guidance method and system for UAV accurate landing

We present a videometric method and system to implement terminal guidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) accurate landing. In the videometric system, two calibrated cameras attached to the ground are used, and a calibration method in which at least 5 control points are applied is developed to calibrate the inner and exterior parameters of the cameras. Cameras with 850nm spectral filter are used to recognize a 850nm LED target fixed on the UAV which can highlight itself in images with complicated background. NNLOG (normalized negative laplacian of gaussian) operator is developed for automatic target detection and tracking. Finally, 3-D position of the UAV with high accuracy can be calculated and transfered to control system to direct UAV accurate landing. The videometric system can work in the rate of 50Hz. Many real flight and static accuracy experiments demonstrate the correctness and veracity of the method proposed in this paper, and they also indicate the reliability and robustness of the system proposed in this paper. The static accuracy experiment results show that the deviation is less-than 10cm when target is far from the cameras and lessthan 2cm in 100m region. The real flight experiment results show that the deviation from DGPS is less-than 20cm. The system implement in this paper won the first prize in the AVIC Cup-International UAV Innovation Grand Prix, and it is the only one that achieved UAV accurate landing without GPS or DGPS.

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