Implementation of autonomous visual tracking and landing for a low-cost quadrotor

This paper presents an implementation of a hybrid system consisting of a low-cost quadrotor and a small pushcart. The quadrotor is controlled with classical Proportional⿿Integral⿿Derivative (PID) controller for autonomous visual tracking and landing on the moving carrier. The vision-based tracking and landing approach utilizes enhancement of red, green and blue (RGB) color information rather than grayscale information of the helipad on the carrier, which shows fast and robust performance in different lighting conditions. This work is characteristic with utilizing the off-the-shelf affordable quadrotor and accomplishing the complex task using only the relative pixel position in image plane without communication between the quadrotor and carrier. The quadrotor's relative position to helipad is estimated with a frequency up to 30 Hz from the video stream, which enables the quadrotor to fly autonomously while performing real-time visual tracking and landing on the carrier. Series of experiments show that our system is easy to deploy and tune, simple and robust, also low-cost.