Vision-Based Automatic Approach and Landing of Fixed-Wing Aircraft Using a Dense Visual Tracking

摘要

This paper presents a feasibility study of a vision-based autonomous approach and landing for an aircraft using a direct visual tracking method. Auto-landing systems based on the Instrument Landing System (ILS) have already proven their importance through decades but general aviation stills without cost-effective solutions for such conditions. However, vision-based systems have shown to have the adequate characteristics for the positioning relatively to the landing runway. In the present paper, rather than points, lines or other features susceptible of extraction and matching errors, dense information is tracked in the sequence of captured images using an Efficient Second-Order Minimization (ESM) method. An optimal control design is then proposed using the homogra-phy matrix as visual information in two distinct approaches: position-based visual servoing (PBVS) and image-based visual servoing (IBVS). To illustrate the proposed concepts, simulation results under realistic atmospheric disturbances are presented.