An Integrated Visual System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Following Ground Vehicles: Simulations and Experiments

The vision of unmanned aerial vehicles is very significant for UAV-related applications such as search and rescue, landing on a moving platform, etc. In this work, we have developed an integrated system for the UAV landing on the moving platform, and the UAV object detection with tracking in the complicated environment. Firstly, we have proposed a robust LoG-based deep neural network for object detection and tracking, which has great advantages in robustness to object scale and illuminations compared with typical deep network-based approaches. Then, we have also improved based on the original Kalman filter and designed an iterative multi-model-based filter to tackle the problem of unknown dynamics in real circumstances of motion estimations. Next, we have implemented the whole system and do ROS Gazebo-based testing in two complicated circumstances to verify the effectiveness of our design. Finally, we have deployed the proposed detection, tracking, and motion estimation strategies into real applications to do UAV tracking of a pillar and do obstacle avoidance. It is demonstrated that our system shows great accuracy and robustness in real applications.