An assisted bilateral control strategy for 3D pose estimation of visual features

Teleoperating a quadrotor equipped with a monocular camera for exploring a wide area in search of something has become a common practice in many application scenarios (e.g. search and rescue). In order to efficiently plan operations, estimating the 3D pose of a point of interest is as important as detecting it. In this paper we propose a novel bilateral teleoperation architecture where an estimation scheme is exploited for recovering the position of a set of visual features while an operator steers the motion of the quadrotor UAV. The operator acts on a force-feedback master device that produces force cues meant to suggest where to drive the quadrotor for improving the convergence rate of the estimation process. The effectiveness of the proposed teleoperation strategy is validated by means of hardware in the loop simulations.