Fast Model Predictive Image-Based Visual Servoing for Quadrotors*

This paper studies the problem of Image-Based Visual Servo Control (IBVS) for quadrotors. Although the control of quadrotors has been extensively studied in the last decades, combining the IBVS module with the quadrotor’s dynamics is still hard, mainly due to the under-actuation issues related to the quadrotor control as opposed to the 6 DoF control outputs generated by the IBVS modules. We propose an alternative formulation to solve this problem, by particularly using linear Model Predictive Control (MPC), that allows us to relax the UAVs under-actuation issues. Stability guarantees of the proposed scheme are presented. The proposed model is validated with synthetic data and tested in a real UAV’s setup.