Learning Vision-Based Quadrotor Control in User Proximity

Abstract

We consider a quadrotor equipped with a forward-facing camera, and an user freely moving in its proximity; we control the quadrotor in order to stay in front of the user, using only camera frames. To do so, we train a deep neural network to predict the drone controls given the camera image. Training data is acquired by running a simple hand-designed controller which relies on optical motion tracking data.