Control of a remotely operated quadrotor aerial vehicle and camera unit using a fly-the-camera perspective

Abstract

This paper presents a mission-centric approach to controlling the optical axis of a video camera mounted on a camera manipulator and fixed to a quadrotor remotely operated vehicle. A four-DOF quadrotor, UAV model will be combined with a two-DOF camera kinematic model to create a single system to provide a full six DOF actuation of the camera view. This work proposed exploits that all signals are described in camera frame. The closed-loop controller is designed based on a Lyapunov-type analysis so that the tracking result is shown to produce globally uniformly ultimately bounded (GUUB). Computer simulation results are provided to demonstrate the suggested controller.