Abstract

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are effective for surveillance and monitoring, but struggle with persistent, long-term tracking, especially without GPS, due to limited flight time. Persistent tracking can be accomplished using multiple vehicles if one vehicle can effectively hand off the tracking information to another replacement vehicle. This work presents a solution to the moving-target handoff problem in the absence of GPS. The proposed solution (a) a nonlinear complementary filter for self-pose estimation using only an IMU, (b) a particle filter for relative pose estimation between UAS using a relative range (c) visual target tracking using a gimballed camera when the target is close to the handoff UAS, and (d) track correlation logic using Procrustes analysis to perform the final target handoff between vehicles. We present hardware results of the self-pose estimation and visual target tracking, as well as an extensive simulation result that demonstrates the effectiveness of our full system, and perform Monte-Carlo simulations that indicate a 97% successful handoff rate using the proposed methods.

Degree

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology; Electrical and Computer Engineering

Rights

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