VisGeo-PipeTrack: A Visual Geometric Servo Control Framework with MPC-RCAPID Control for UAV-Based Dynamic Pipes Tracking

While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed for pipeline inspection, prevailing research predominantly assumes static pipes. In real-world industrial environments, pipes often exhibit dynamic movements, such as vibrations. This imposes more stringent requirements on UAVs' adaptive control and computational efficiency than in static scenarios. Therefore, this paper proposes a servo control framework named VisGeo-PipeTrack, which utilizes geometric constraints to enable UAV tracking of dynamic pipes. To achieve efficient UAV positioning, YOLOv5 is employed to detect labels on the pipe. The positions are derived from visual geometric constraints based on these detected labels to enable precise localization. To address tracking control challenges, a model predictive control based real-time corrected adaptive PID (MPC-RCAPID) controller is proposed. This controller employs the Recursive Least Squares method for real-time model estimation and integrates rolling horizon optimization to dynamically adjust PID parameters. Experiments conducted on both the AirSim simulator and the Tello UAV platform validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Simulation comparisons with standard PID, fractional-order PID, adaptive PID, and fuzzy PID demonstrate that MPC-RCAPID achieves the shortest settling time (3.26 s) and the lowest average tracking error (3.52%). In physical experiments on the Tello platform, compared with standard PID control, MPC-RCAPID reduces the average tracking error by 55.52%, 26.72%, and 26.52% across the three test dimensions. These results demonstrate that VisGeo-PipeTrack facilitates efficient autonomous tracking in dynamic pipe environments.