Vision-Based Modeling and Control of Quadcopter for Uncooperative Ground Mobile Target Tracking

This paper proposes a novel approach based vision for modeling and controlling a Quadcopter UAV (QUAV) for uncooperative ground mobile target tracking applications. The proposed method is an Image-Based Visual Servoing (IBVS) approach using the dynamics of the target’s image features, calculated in a virtual camera as well as QUAV’s cinematic and dynamic model elaborated with respect to the virtual camera frame and the image’s features moments. A control scheme based on the Sliding Mode Controller (SMC) is used to ensure the QUAV control in the presence of external disturbances and measurement uncertainties. Simulation results are presented to assess the proposed strategy under realistic conditions.