Vision and Control for UAVs: A Survey of General Methods and of Inexpensive Platforms for Infrastructure Inspection

Sensors

Koppány Máthé¹  Lucian Buşoniu² 

[1] Automation Department, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Memorandumului Street no. 28, 400114 Cluj-Napoca, Romania; E-Mail

关键词: unmanned aerial vehicle;    control;    planning;    camera-based sensing;    infrastructure inspection;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s150714887

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant attention in recent years. Low-cost platforms using inexpensive sensor payloads have been shown to provide satisfactory flight and navigation capabilities. In this report, we survey vision and control methods that can be applied to low-cost UAVs, and we list some popular inexpensive platforms and application fields where they are useful. We also highlight the sensor suites used where this information is available. We overview, among others, feature detection and tracking, optical flow and visual servoing, low-level stabilization and high-level planning methods. We then list popular low-cost UAVs, selecting mainly quadrotors. We discuss applications, restricting our focus to the field of infrastructure inspection. Finally, as an example, we formulate two use-cases for railway inspection, a less explored application field, and illustrate the usage of the vision and control techniques reviewed by selecting appropriate ones to tackle these use-cases. To select vision methods, we run a thorough set of experimental evaluations.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.