Adaptive Visual Servoing Control for Quadrotors: A Bio-inspired Strategy Using Active Vision

Abstract

New insights into the landing behavior of bumblebees show an adaptive strategy where the optical flow expansion of the landing target is step-wise regulated. In this article, the potential benefits of this approach are studied by replicating the landing experiment with a quadrotor. To this end, an open-loop switching method is developed, enabling fast steps in divergence. An adaptive control law is used to deal with non-linear system dynamics, where the control gain is scheduled based on the control effectiveness of the actuator inputs during the steps. It is demonstrated that the quadrotor can reliably land on the target from varying initial positions, and the switching strategy shows a slight reduction in landing time compared to a constant divergence strategy with the same average divergence over distance. This strategy also reduces the maximum velocity during the landing.