Autonomous search and tracking of objects using model predictive control of unmanned aerial vehicle and gimbal: Hardware-in-the-loop simulation of payload and avionics
Original version
Valavanis, Kimon P. [Eds.] 2015 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS) p. 904-913, IEEE conference proceedings, 2015 10.1109/ICUAS.2015.7152377Abstract
This paper describes the design of model predictive control (MPC) for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used to track objects of interest identified by a real-time camera vision (CV) module in a search and track (SAT) autonomous system. A fully functional UAV payload is introduced, which includes an infra-red (IR) camera installed in a two-axis gimbal system. Hardware-in-loop (HIL) simulations are performed to test the MPC's performance in the SAT system, where the gimbal attitude and the UAV's flight trajectory are optimized to place the object to be tracked in the center of the IR camera's image.