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Abstract
Issue Title: Special Issue: Selected papers from the 2nd International Symposium on UAVs, Reno, U.S.A. June 8-10, 2009 / Guest Edited by Kimon P. Valavanis, Randy Beard, Paul Y. Oh, Anibal Ollero, Les A. Piegl and Hyunchul Shim
In this paper a vision-based approach for guidance and safe landing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is proposed. The UAV is required to navigate from an initial to a final position in a partially known environment. The guidance system allows a remote user to define target areas from a high resolution aerial or satellite image to determine either the waypoints of the navigation trajectory or the landing area. A feature-based image-matching algorithm finds the natural landmarks and gives feedbacks to an onboard, hierarchical, behaviour-based control system for autonomous navigation and landing. Two algorithms for safe landing area detection are also proposed, based on a feature optical flow analysis. The main novelty is in the vision-based architecture, extensively tested on a helicopter, which, in particular, does not require any artificial landmark (e.g., helipad). Results show the appropriateness of the vision-based approach, which is robust to occlusions and light variations.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]