Optimal Visual Servoed Guidance Of Outdoor Autonomous Robotic Airships

This paper describes a visual servo control scheme for an outdoor autonomous airship in path following tasks. The visual based guidance takes full authority of the robotic airship and it is based on lines as image features, extracted from an on-board camera. An optimal controller is designed using the dynamic model of the system, which tackles the dynamics of the airship and the dynamics of the vision process. To prevent from losing image features during camera motion, to deal with noisy output measurements and modeling inaccuracies, a Kalman estimator was employed. The approach is validated through simulations using the AURORA project underactuated airship.1779784Bryson, A.E., Ho, Y.C., (1975) Applied Optimal Control, , Halsted Press, Washington D.C., EUADe Paiva, E.C., Bueno, S.S., Gomes, S.B.V., Ramos, J.J.G., Bergerman, M., A control system development environment for AURORA's semi-autonomous robotic airship (1999) Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 2328-2335. , Detroit, EUA, MayElfes, A., Bueno, S.S., Bergerman, M., Ramos, J.G., A semi-autonomous robotic airship for environment monitoring missions IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Leuven, Belgium, May 1998Espiau, B., Chaumette, F., Rives, P., A new approach to visual servoing in robotics (1992) IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 8 (3), pp. 313-326Gomes, S., Ramos, J.G., Airship dynamic modeling for autonomous operation IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Leuven, Belgium, May 1998Lewis, F.L., (1986) Optimal Estimation with an Introductory to Stochastic Control Theory, , John Wiley and Sons, IncPissard-Gibollet, R., Rives, P., Applying visual servoing techniques to control a mobile hand-eye system IEEE Int. Conference on Robotics and Automation, Nagoya, Japan, May 1995Rives, P., Borrelly, J., Visual servoing techniques applied to an underwater vehicle IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics Ans Automation, Albuquerque, USA, April 1997Samson, C., Espiau, B., Le Borges, M., (1990) Robot Control: The Task Function Approach, , Oxford University Press, EUASilveira, G.F., Carvalho, J.R.H., Madrid, M.K., Bueno, S.S., Rives, P., Lateral control of an aerial unmanned robot using visual servoing techniques (2001) Proceedings of the IEEE 2nd Workshop on Robot Motion and Control, pp. 263-268. , Poland, OctoberSilveira, G.F., Carvalho, J.R.H., Madrid, M.K., Bueno, S.S., Rives, P., Towards vision guided navigation of autonomous aerial robots Anais do V Simpósio Brasileiro de Automação Inteligente, Canela/RS, Brasil, November 2001, , Article 1065Silveira, G.F., Carvalho, J.R.H., Shiroma, P.M., Rives, P., Bueno, S.S., Visual servo control of nonholonomic mobile robots (2001) Proceedings of the 16th Brazilian Congress of Mechanical Engineering, 15, pp. 333-341. , Uberlândia/MG, Brasil, NovemberStevens, B.L., Lewis, F.L., (1992) Aircraft Control and Simulation, , John Wiley and Sons, Inc., EUAVan Der Zwaan, S., Bernadino, A., Santos-Victor, J., Vision based station keeping and docking for an aerial blimp Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2000Zhang, H., Ostrowski, J.P., Visual servoing with dynamics: Control of an unmanned blimp (1999) Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 618-623. , Michigan, EUA, Ma