GPS劣化環境下での協調UAVのための視覚ベースリーダー・フォロワー編隊制御
Vision-Based Leader-Follower Formation Control for Cooperative UAVs in GPS-Degraded Environments
フォロワーUAVに搭載したRGB-DカメラでリーダーUAVを検出・追跡し、相対位置を推定して編隊を維持する視覚ベースの協調制御フレームワークを提案・評価した。
著者: Deekshitha Angadi, Naveena Budda, Vikas Agarwal, Rojesh Arunkumar Mulasa, Ravi Killamsetty, Mohamed Samshad, Narsimlu Kemsaram
分類: cs.RO
原文アブストラクト
Cooperation in multi-UAV systems requires reliable relative perception so that follower vehicles can maintain formation and continue their mission safely even when absolute positioning sensors degrade or fail. This paper presents a vision-based cooperative formation framework running on a follower UAV that uses a front-facing RGB-D camera to detect, track, and localize a leader UAV in real-time. A lightweight YOLO-based detector is trained on a dedicated drone dataset and deployed onboard to predict leader bounding boxes, which are then fused with depth information via a pinhole camera model to estimate the leader's relative pose. These estimates provide a leader-follower position controller and can also be used as a backup when GPS or external localization is unavailable. This framework is implemented as a set of ROS nodes and evaluated in a physics-based multi-UAV simulation built on XTDrone, with sensor noise and communication dropouts. We evaluate detection accuracy, runtime, and formation-keeping error under nominal conditions and under simulated failures of the positioning sensors. The results show that the proposed framework maintains stable leader-follower formations with reasonable computational cost and provides a practical basis for extending vision-based cooperative formation control to real-world multi-UAV systems.