A study on autonomous searching and tracking by an unmanned helicopter based on GPS and image information

摘要

This paper describes the autonomous navigation system of an unmanned helicopter, in which GPS information and image information are integrated and the unmanned helicopter R-max produced by Yamaha Motor Inc. is used. The developed system can track a moving target based on pyramids images generated by an image splitter. It can explore a wide area and re-capture a target when it is lost by means of active vision concept. During navigation, the navigation control system manages flying modes according to an assigned task and controls the speed of the helicopter. To show the performance of the developed system, experiments of searching and tracking a truck moving on ground are performed.