Vision-Based Control of a Tether-Suspended Aerial Radiation Sensing Payload

Abstract

Aerial radiation surveys achieve higher sensitivity when the radiation detector is held close to the ground. Detector sensitivity falls off roughly with the inverse square of the distance to the source, so a detector flown high is slower to reach a given minimum detectable activity. Flying the vehicle low puts the propellers near the ground, where downwash can disturb the surveyed area and resuspend contaminated particulates. Tether suspension decouples the detector from the vehicle altitude, but leaves the payload unactuated and only indirectly controllable. We therefore present a vision-based control approach for an aerial sensing payload suspended on a tether beneath a heavy-lift drone. Because a survey plan is decided as radiation detections arrive, we design a pilot aid for commanding the survey trajectory manually with a handheld transmitter. The controller regulates the payload, rather than the vehicle, onto that trajectory. The system uses onboard sensors with a downward-facing camera fixed to the drone body tracking a ring marker on the payload. A four-state Kalman filter estimates the tether swing angles and rates from payload bearing measurements, and a linear quadratic regulator with integral action takes the payload position as the regulated output. In outdoor flight tests under wind, the payload-aware controller reduced payload tracking error during transit by 20% when compared against a vehicle-referenced baseline, with the cost of higher peak error on arrival at a waypoint.