A Vision-Based Unmanned Helicopter Ship Board Landing System

Abstract

We design a vision-based system to enable an unmanned helicopter to land on a ship. Based on affine moment invariants, fuzzy recognition, Kalman filter and a PI controller, the helicopter can identify a target, track it, and land on it while the ship is in motion even oscillation. A simulation system, including an unmanned helicopter and a ship, has been developed for test our ideas. Simulation results validate our algorithm. In simulation our algorithm has successfully isolated the influence of helicopter's oscillation and found the best threshold between performance and precision. The results shown that our algorithm is robust, the tracker can track target in two-dimensions very well.