Towards Autonomous Modular UAV Missions: The Detection, Geo-Location and Landing Paradigm

Nowadays, various unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications become increasingly demanding since they require real-time, autonomous and intelligent functions. Towards this end, in the present study, a fully autonomous UAV scenario is implemented, including the tasks of area scanning, target recognition, geo-location, monitoring, following and finally landing on a high speed moving platform. The underlying methodology includes AprilTag target identification through Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) parallelized processing, image processing and several optimized locations and approach algorithms employing gimbal movement, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) readings and UAV navigation. For the experimentation, a commercial and a custom made quad-copter prototype were used, portraying a high and a low-computational embedded platform alternative. Among the successful targeting and follow procedures, it is shown that the landing approach can be successfully performed even under high platform speeds.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  Italian National Conference on Sensors

• Publication date

  2016-11-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Computer Science, Engineering, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3390/s16111844PMID 27827883PMCID 5134503
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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