Author(s)

Liu Yuzhe, Chen Biao

Corresponding Author

Chen Biao

ABSTRACT

An automatic alignment method for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) antennas based on visual center coinciding was proposed. In our scheme, UAV carries a simple omni-directional antenna and a land station uses high gain directional antenna, which can be driven by a pan-tilt to point to UAV’s antenna. A camera is bound together with the antenna and a computer is employed to process the video and control the motion of pan-tilt, in order to keep the image of UAV’s antenna at the center of the whole picture. If the distance between center of UAV image and center of the whole picture is kept within a few pixels, then antennas are aligned. Our experiments show that the proposed antenna auto-alignment method can achieve accurate alignment of antenna with an alignment error of less than 1°. Furthermore, the error estimation formula is given and verified by experiments.

KEYWORDS

Antenna Alignment, Automatic Alignment, Visual Center Coinciding, Alignment Accuracy