Time: 14:00-15:00, March 31 (*Note the time!)*

Place: Room 3721, Lindstedtsv 25

*Vision Based Guidance for Micro Air Vehicles *

Randy Beard

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Brigham Young University Provo, Utah

Abstract

This talk will focus on guidance strategies for micro air vehicles that use electro-optical camera as the primary guidance sensor. The talk will first provide an overview of the UAV testbed developed at BYU and briefly describe implementation issues. We will then discuss vision based tracking algorithms for ground based targets. The main idea is to explicitly maneuver the vehicle to maintain the target in the camera field-of-view. We will also discuss vision enabled precise landing and show results of a MAV landing in the back of a moving truck. We will discuss reactive and deliberative schemes for vision based collision avoidance algorithms. The reactive scheme pushes the target to a desired bearing in the body frame, similar to collision avoidance schemes used by humans. The deliberative scheme maps the world and plans paths in the vehicle navigation. Flight results will be shown for each of these methods.