Abstract
Vision and flight are closely linked, leading to a longstanding
interest in how the two are connected. Past research
has proposed models for vision in control for biological
examples of flight, and there has been recent interest in
the use of vision for low-level control of small robotic aircraft
such as quad-rotor helicopters. In the work presented
here, we show a system for stabilization of a small, fixedwing
aircraft in the yaw axis using estimates of parametric
optical flow obtained by registration of consecutive video
images from a camera mounted on the aircraft. Estimates
of angular velocity from the registration replace the values
that would otherwise come from a gyro in a conventional
stabilization system. No markers or special targets are required
– just an environment with enough visual variation
to enable image registration. We demonstrate the system in
flight and show qualitatively the efficacy of the stabilization
from external observation of the aircraft, and from the video
acquired from the onboard camera.
1 Introduction
Refereed
No
