Autonomous Flight System for UAVs to Selected Objects

Abstract

Manual control of an agricultural unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with simultaneous video stream analysis imposes excessive cognitive load on the operator, leading to control and observation errors. Additionally, disturbances such as forested areas, urban infrastructure, and complex terrain hinder reliable object surveillance. This paper proposes a system in which the operator provides an initial indication of the object of interest, after which the visual tracking system autonomously maintains target tracking and generates control commands without further human intervention. All computations are performed on an onboard computer additionally installed on the UAV, which does not require communication with a ground station. To ensure compatibility with the output of the PID controller, an algorithm has been developed that allows the use of a standard flight controller without modifying its internal control loops. Experimental validation of the proposed solution was conducted in a custom-developed simulation environment based on Unity. PID controller coefficients were tuned empirically, and the configuration of the CSRT tracker was selected for operation with a low-contrast object with poorly defined boundaries. For the final system evaluation, a satellite antenna mounted on a communication tower was used as the object of interest. The tracking accuracy achieved was 0.05% of the screen diagonal over the entire tracking sequence and 0.007% of the screen diagonal during the steady-state phase, when the center of the bounding box coincides with the screen center, at a display resolution of 720×480 and a processing rate of 45.5 FPS on an Intel Core i7-11700F computing platform