A Novel Flight Controller Interface for Vision-Guided Autonomous Drone

Aerial vehicles are rapidly exploring places in a variety of applications in the service sector such as transport assistance and other logistics involved sectors. Most applications require local perception for the aerial vehicles wherein vision system is the most powerful information. Such local perception may be designed based on landmarks on the ground below. This paper details the work where a computer vision system is aiding in landmark identification, namely, a line strip on the ground below. The vision system is implemented in a real-time controller, and a novel and simple interface solution is presented to interface the vision controller to the flight controller. The aerial vehicle under consideration is quadrotor type. The paper presents the details of the image processing algorithm along with the hardware details of the flight control interface. The vision system is developed to identify line strips which share sufficient contrast with the background under daylight condition. The image analysis is performed to continuously extract the lateral position and yaw error. Such an interface would serve as a computationally cheap and easy solution over traditional programmable flight control interface solutions such as MAVLINK.