Visual servoing of a Quadrotor UAV for autonomous power lines inspection

The objective of this work is to achieve real time tracking of power conductors using a Quadrotor Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV). Two solutions are proposed. For the first solution, the control is directly solved in the 2D image space. The link between image features and the kinematics of the vehicle is achieved using an Image Based Visual Servoing (IBVS) formulation, combined with a Linear Quadratic Servo (LQ-Servo) approach. In the second solution, a partial pose of the vehicle with respect to (wrt) the lines is estimated. Then, a position controller designed in the Cartesian space is used to drive the vehicle to the desired configuration. Experimental results are provided to validate the two approaches.