Photometric Long-Range Positioning of LED Targets for Cooperative Navigation in UAVs

Autonomous flight with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) nowadays depends on the availability and reliability of Global Navigation Satellites Systems (GNSS). In cluttered outdoor scenarios, such as narrow gorges, or near tall artificial structures, such as bridges or dams, reduced sky visibility and multipath effects compromise the quality and the trustworthiness of the GNSS position fixes, making autonomous, or even manual, flight difficult and dangerous. To overcome this problem, cooperative navigation has been proposed: a second UAV flies away from any occluding objects and in line of sight from the first and provides the latter with positioning information, removing the need for full and reliable GNSS coverage in the area of interest. In this work we use high-power light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to signalize the second drone and we present a computer vision pipeline that allows to track the second drone in real-time from a distance up to 100 m and to compute its relative position with decimeter accuracy. This is based on an extension to the classical iterative algorithm for the Perspective-n-Points problem in which the photometric error is minimized according to a image formation model. This extension allow to substantially increase the accuracy of point-feature measurements in image space (up to 0.05 pixels), which directly translates into higher positioning accuracy with respect to conventional methods.