Control of a Remotely Operated Quadrotor Aerial Vehicle and Camera Unit Using a Fly-The-Camera Perspective

摘要

This paper presents a mission-centric approach to controlling the optical axis of a video camera mounted on a camera manipulator and fixed to a quadrotor remotely operated vehicle. The approach considers that for video collection tasks a single operator should be able to operate the systems by 'flying-the-camera'; that is, collect video from the perspective that the operator is looking out of and is the pilot of the camera. This will allow the control of the quadrotor and the camera positioner to be fused into a single control problem where the camera is positioned using the four degree-of-freedom (DOF) quadrotor and the two DOF camera positioner to provide a full six DOF actuation of the camera view. The closed-loop controller is designed based on a Lyapunov-type analysis and is shown to produce Globally Uniformly Ultimately Bounded (GUUB) tracking of a desired trajectory. Computer simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the suggested controller.