Force protection via UGV-UVA collaboration development of control law for vision based target tracking on SUAV

Abstract

The Naval Postgraduate School UAV Laboratory developed a Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (SUAV) equipped with a Vision Based Target Tracking (VBTT) system as part of its Tactical Network Topology field experimentation program. The VBTT system includes a miniaturized gimbaled camera that allows autonomous target tracking while providing concurrent estimates of target motion including its position, velocity and heading. Using the current control law, the speed of convergence and the range-holding performance have been found to deteriorate as target speed increases. The aim of this thesis is to elaborate on the existing control law in order to achieve better performance. Employing a new and novel algorithm from the Lyapunov Stability Analysis, for the purpose of adjusting the feedback gain, is proposed in this thesis; to that end a control law with adjustable gain can be easily implemented based on UAV-Target kinematics to optimize UAV performance. The performance of the newly adjustable gain control law is tested in both SIMULINK model and Hardware-In-the-Loop simulations to verify any improvement in performance over the constant gain control law. Principal results offer improved SUAV target-tracking performance with no additional hardware costs.