FPGA based HW/SW co-design for vision based real-time position measurement of an UAV

Recently, in order to increase the efficiency and mission success rate of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), the necessity for formation flights is increased. In general, GPS (Global Positioning System) is used to obtain the relative position of leader with respect to follower in formation flight. However, it can’t be utilized in environment where GPS jamming may occur or communication is impossible. Therefore, in this study, monocular vision is used for measuring relative position. General PCbased vision processing systems has larger size than embedded systems and is hard to install on small vehicles. Thus FPGAbased processing board is used to make our system small and compact. The processing system is divided into two blocks, PL(Programmable Logic) and PS(Processing system). PL is consisted of many parallel logic arrays and it can handle large amount of data fast, and it is designed in hardware-wise. PS is consisted of conventional processing unit like ARM processor in hardware-wise and sequential processing algorithm is installed on it. Consequentially HW/SW co-designed FPGA system is used for processing input images and measuring a relative 3D position of the leader, and this system showed RMSE accuracy of 0.42 cm ~ 0.51 cm.