Kinematic visual servoing based regulation of quadrotors on a predefined marker

The visual servoing based regulation of quadrotors has been an attractive topic over the past decade, and a lot of controllers are proposed for this challenging problem. The regulation controller proposed in this paper follows the Position Based Visual Servoing (PBVS) paradigm. Most of the PBVS controllers, if not all, are implemented assuming the position of the quadrotor with reference to the marker has been accurately recovered with an independent observer/estimator. Therefore the rigorous regulation stability cannot be promised due to the separation principle does not hold for the general nonlinear systems. Accordingly, a new PBVS controller is proposed in this paper for the regulation of quadrotors by embedding a novel adaptive estimator into this new controller to estimate the position of the quadrotor online. It is proved by Lyapunov theory that the proposed adaptive PBVS controller gives rise to the asymptotic regulation and the convergence of the estimated position to the actual one. An experiment is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.