Direct visual servoing of UAVs using onboard monocular camera

Most current unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) rely on the global positioning system (GPS) for positioning. When the GPS signal is blocked, sensor-fusion-based methods are primarily used for UAV localization. However, heavy computational processing is required in most existing methods for reliably estimating the position. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a scheme involving direct visual feedback control of UAVs by using an onboard monocular camera. The feature of this scheme is that relative position information between the observed environment and the UAV is transmitted to a flight controller directly without any sensor fusion process, which will contribute to improved recognition of changing environments and quicker responses. This work is an extension of our previous work [1], with extra experiments.