Vision-Based Stabilization for Fixed-Wing Flight

Abstract

Vision and flight are closely linked, leading to a longstanding interest in how the two are connected. Past research has proposed models for vision in control for biological examples of flight, and there has been recent interest in the use of vision for low-level control of small robotic aircraft such as quad-rotor helicopters. In the work presented here, we show a system for stabilization of a small, fixedwing aircraft in the yaw axis using estimates of parametric optical flow obtained by registration of consecutive video images from a camera mounted on the aircraft. Estimates of angular velocity from the registration replace the values that would otherwise come from a gyro in a conventional stabilization system. No markers or special targets are required – just an environment with enough visual variation to enable image registration. We demonstrate the system in flight and show qualitatively the efficacy of the stabilization from external observation of the aircraft, and from the video acquired from the onboard camera. 1 Introduction