Autonomous Aerial Navigation and Tracking of Marine Animals
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Autonomous Aerial Navigation and Tracking of Marine Animals
Wil Selby
Peter Corke
Daniela Rus
MIT Distributed Robotics Lab
Fall 2011
This video compliments our paper at from Australaian Conference on Robotics and Automation 2011 (ACRA).
In this paper, we describe the development of an independent and on-board visual servoing system which allows a computationally impoverished aerial vehicle to autonomously identify and track a moving surface target. Our image seg- mentation and target identification algorithms were developed with the specific task of monitoring whales at sea but could be adapted for other targets. Observing whales is important for many marine biology tasks and is currently performed manually from the shore or from boats. We also present hardware experiments which demonstrate the capabilities of our algorithms for object identification and tracking that enable a flying vehicle to track a moving target.