Hardware in the loop implementation of adaptive vision based guidance law for ground target tracking

Abstract

An adaptive guidance law of a Vision Based Target Tracking (VBTT) system was previously developed and implemented onboard a Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (SUAV) in order to track a ground target moving with a constant velocity. This work extends previous results by considering scenarios where the variation of target velocity, in both magnitude and direction, is used to excite the feedback control law for further robustness analysis. This provides essential insight on the sensitivity of the performance criteria indicated by the range holding capability, navigation error and the convergence speed of the guidance law. In addition, this thesis addresses the robustness of the SUAV guidance law to the generalized time delay in feedback due to, for example, data processing or communications lag. This thesis also extends the previously obtained results by introducing a multi-criteria optimization technique. The results obtained are first based on the numerical simulations implemented in SIMULINK and then in high fidelity HIL simulation environment with Piccolo Plus AP in the control loop. Initial steps in developing Vision Based HIL environment incorporating TASE gimbal, Piccolo Plus AP, Pan-Tilt unit and image processing software are presented. The work also includes motivation for the development, an overview of the existing technologies, and initial implementation of low-level driving mechanism (drivers) for the realistic representation of the real-world environment.