Design and Implementation of a Real-Time Visual Tracking System for UAVs Based on PSDK

This paper presents the design and implementation of a real-time visual tracking system for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), based on the DJIPayload Software Development Kit (PSDK), addressing the challenge of balancing high precision with low latency on resource-constrained edge platforms. By utilizing DJI PSDK to abandon the Robot Operating System (ROS) layer and its associated serialization overhead, the proposed Middleware-Free Architecture reduces end-to-end latency by over 60% to approximately 30 ms. To address computational constraints, a Lightweight Asymmetric De-coupled Visual Servoing (ADVS) strategy is proposed. It adopts orthogonal kinematic de-coupling to bypass Jacobian matrix inversion and integrates a non-linear dead-zone mechanism with dynamics-aware gain scheduling to compensate for sensing anisotropy and gravitational nonlinearity. Simultaneously, a Geometry-Aware Fusion strategy is employed to reject visual outliers, while a Finite State Machine (FSM) strictly enforces temporal consistency. Field experiments in various scenarios verify the system's stability and tracking capability. Specifically, the platform maintains a robust lock on targets at speeds up to 23 m/s across dynamic maneuvers. The successful implementation of this system confirms that high-performance edge tracking does not rely solely on the scaling of visual model complexity but can also be effectively achieved through the architectural minimization of latency combined with the optimization of theoretically grounded robust control strategies.