Visual Servoing of Quadrotor to Navigation in Greenhouse Crop

Most crops are cultivated in rows and an important step for an agricultural vehicle is the crop row
detection for automatic guidance. In the same way in greenhouse crops, the cultivation pattern is in
rows, the advantage is that there is greater control over production, climate and crop protection.
In this article, an autonomous navigation of a quadrotor is presented by means of a mono-camera and
visual servoing. We focus on a navigation where no prior knowledge of the environment is required.
Our research embeds an image-based visual servoing control. The servoing process works on model
of the quadrotor and relies on two visual features, namely the vanishing point location and the
orientation of the yaw angle in the quadrotor frame formed by the straight lines related to the gutter
tabletops bar into the greenhouse (polytunnels), to derive a nonlinear controller. Computer
simulations that regulate a quadrotor to a desired position with respect to vanishing point lying on a
horizontal plane and a full rotated orientation are conducted separately. Besides, the altitude will be
controlled based on sliding mode theory for hovering aircraft.