Autonomous Vision-based Target Detection and Safe Landing for UAV

Target detection is crucial for many applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) such as search and rescue, object transportation, object detection, inspection, and mapping. One of the considerable applications of target detection is the safe landing of UAV to the drone station for battery charging and its maintenance. For this, vision-based target detection methods are utilized. Generally, high-cost cameras and expensive CPU’s were used for target detection. With the recent development of Raspberry Pi (RPi), it is possible to use the embedded system with cheap price for such applications. In the current research, RPi based drone target detection and safe landing system are proposed with the integration of PID controller for target detection, and Fuzzy Logic controller for safe landing. The proposed system is equipped with a USB camera which is connected to RPi for detecting the target and a laser rangefinder (LIDAR) for measuring the distance for safe landing. To verify the performance of the developed system, a practical test bench based on a quadcopter and a target drone station is developed. Several experiments were conducted under different scenarios. The result shows that the proposed system works well for the target finding and safe landing of the quadcopter.