Image-Based Visual Servoing of a Fully-Actuated Hexacopter

In this paper, a novel image-based visual servoing (IBVS) approach is proposed for a fully-actuated hexacopter, which allows to maintain a stable attitude with the horizontal movement. In contrast to the existing methods, the key insight is to integrate the IBVS method to the fully-actuated hexacopter, which can alleviate the field of view (FOV) constraint. Specifically, the nonlinear hierarchical position and attitude controller is designed based on its dynamic characteristics. In the outer loop, an new IBVS method with perspective moments is employed to design the force input. The inner loop utilizes the quaternion to generate the torque input. Comparative simulations are conducted to verify that the proposed method can relax the FOV constraint greatly.