Monocular visual servo control of a quadcopter for crossing windows, doors, and corridors

Abstract This paper proposes a sequential visual servo control scheme for quadcopters, where the main goal is to drive a quadcopter to a desired pose while crossing windows, doors, or corridors using only visual feedback. This control scheme is composed of two stages that act in sequence: the approaching and pose regulation phases. A switching control law in the approaching stage is in charge of bringing the quadcopter in front of the target while keeping the target in the camera's field of view (visibility task). The target could be a window, a door, or the end of a corridor. The pose regulation control drives the quadcopter through the target to reach the desired pose. The stability analysis of the closed‐loop switching control law is provided considering the approaching and visibility tasks. This allowed us to verify the asymptotic convergence of the errors to the origin. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme was validated with experiments using a commercial quadcopter.