Towards vision-based safe landing for an autonomous helicopter

✍ Scribed by Pedro J. Garcia-Pardo; Gaurav S. Sukhatme; James F. Montgomery

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 375 KB
• Volume: 38
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0921-8890
• DOI: 10.1016/s0921-8890(01)00166-x

✦ Synopsis

Autonomous landing is a challenging problem for aerial robots. An autonomous landing manoeuver depends largely on two capabilities: the decision of where to land and the generation of control signals to guide the vehicle to a safe landing. We focus on the first capability here by presenting a strategy and an underlying fast algorithm as the computer vision basis to make a safe landing decision. The experimental results obtained from real test flights on a helicopter testbed demonstrate the robustness of the approach under widely different light, altitude and background texture conditions, as well as its feasibility for limited-performance embedded computers.