Kinematic visual servo controls of an X4-flyer: Practical study

Image moments provide an important class of image features used for image-based visual servo control. Perspective zeroth and first order image moments provide a quasi linear and decoupled link between the image features and the translational degrees of freedom. Spherical first-order image moments have the additional desirable passivity property. They allow to decouple the position control scheme from the rotation dynamics. This property is suitable to control an under-actuated aerial vehicle such as a quadrotor. In this paper a range of kinematic control laws using spherical image moments and perspective image moments are experimented on a quadrotor aerial vehicle prototype. The task considered is to reach a desired position with respect to a specified target. Three control schemes show excellent performances in practice whereas each one has different theoretical properties.