Vision-Based UAV Navigation in Orchards*

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are becoming increasingly common in agricultural applications. Currently, they are primarily used to fly over fields in open space. Navigation inside orchard-like environments remains challenging. We study the problem of orchard navigation with cameras on an aerial vehicle. We study both the controller and the vision component. For the vision component, we provide two methods for detecting orchard rows with frontal facing cameras. In the monocular case, we present a pipeline to extract the geometry of tree rows when there is a well defined path structure. In the binocular case, we present a depth-based navigation algorithm to extract the rows. For the controller component, we design a controller that uses both frontal and downward facing cameras and provides reliable performance even on the presence of strong wind disturbances.