Adaptive control for the on-board pan-tilt camera in an UAV ground-target-tracking system
Xuebo Zhang · Control theory & applications · 2010
For a ground-target-tracking system in an unmanned helicopter,an adaptive on-board pan-tilt motion controller is proposed to adjust the camera’s pose to maintain the image of the tracked ground-moving target being at the center of the viewing frame,when the extrinsic parameters of the camera are unknown.First,the dynamic characteristics of the image signal are analyzed and a kinematics model is developed for the target in the image space by the geometrical relations among the helicopter,the target and the camera.Then,an adaptive pan-tilt motion control law is proposed based on the model to keep the target being at the center of the viewing frame.The performance of the controller is demonstrated by both the theoretical stability analysis and simulation results,showing that the proposed adaptive controller can maintain the target image at the center of the viewing frame in the presence of unknown camera extrinsic parameters.