A vision system for landing an unmanned helicopter in a complex environment

摘要

We present a vision-based landing algorithm for an autonomous helicopter under complex environment (there are several suspected targets). The algorithm is integrated with algorithms for visual acquisition, recognition of the target and computing the navigation information. In our algorithm, we use international standard landing mark as our landing target. The experiment results demonstrate that our algorithm has the feature of robustness, accuracy and real time. It can meet the actual flight requirements well: the average processing time of a 640×480 image is less than 40ms; the position error is below 5cm in each axis of translation; the angle error is below 3.5°. Based on the algorithm, we win the champion of the aerial robot competition in the 2008 China robot competition and the RoboCup China open.