Target Tracking with Multi-rotor Aerial Vehicles based on a Robust Visual Servo Controller with Prescribed Performance

Abstract

In this paper, we present an image-based visual servo control scheme for tracking a moving target using a multirotor aerial vehicle. The proposed scheme is based on the prescribed performance control notion and it is able to impose appropriately selected performance specifications on the image feature errors to satisfy visibility constraints arising from the camera limited field of view, while exhibiting robustness against calibration and depth estimation errors. The proposed controller is of low complexity and computational cost and thus can be easily implemented on the embedded control unit of an autonomous aerial vehicle. The resulting scheme has analytically guaranteed stability and convergence properties, while its applicability and performance are verified via a realistic simulation scenario, where a quadrotor successfully tracks a visual target located on top of a moving mobile robot.