Download or read book On Autonomous Target Tracking for UAVs written by Panagiotis Theodorakopoulos and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are related to events that occur on the ground. In particular, ground target tracking, be the target static, slowly moving or maneuvering at high speeds, is an essential task for UAVs. The overall objective of this thesis is to provide methods to endow a drone to autonomously track a moving ground target, under the following conditions: - A fixed wing UAV equipped with a monocular camera. - Presence of obstacles that hinder ground visibility. - No Fly Zones that limit the airspace. - Restrictions on the field of view of the observing sensor (a camera) - Various target dynamics and behavior: the target may be either moving on an open field or on a road network, and also has dynamic constraints (e.g. if it is a car). It can be neutral or evasive: in the latter case, it can exploit the presence of obstacles, denoted as "shadows" to avoid being tracked by the UAV, making the problem akin to a "hide and seek" game. The thesis proposes three approaches to tackle this problem: - A control based navigation method, - An adversarial predictive method, - And a discrete game theoretic approach. Results obtained in realistic simulations and with an actual UAV are presented to evaluate and compare the pros and cons of each approach. Extensions to the multi-drone case are also considered.