Aerial Drone Platform for Asset Tracking Using an Active Gimbal

We present a low cost quadrotor drone platform capable of visual servoing using an on-board camera placed on an active gimbal and on-board computation. The drone was built using basic off-the-shelf components and a few custom 3D printed parts and open source software. We plan to use this platform for visual inspection using autonomous navigation including takeoff, tracking and landing. Most commercial platforms that we investigated are significantly more expensive and are not flexible enough for the task we envision. We demonstrate the performance of our system on a simple task of visual servoing above a fiduciary marker. A key element is the active gimbal which is driven to maintain the target in the center of the field-of-view, regardless of the drone maneuvers.