Journal of Applied Science and Engineering

Published by Tamkang University Press

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Research on Automatic Tracking System of Dynamic Targets Based on UAV

 2026

 Volume 34

Mengqi Wei and Qi Yang

School of Mechanical Engineering, Shenyang Ligong University, Shenyang 110159, China.

Received: June 03, 2026
Accepted: June 28, 2026
Publication Date: August 12, 2026

上傳圖片

SolidWorks 3D model of the multi-rotor UAV and two-axis direct-drive gimbal. 

 Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.

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Aiming at the critical engineering pain points of visual tracking systems for small multi-rotor UAVs, including onboard payload redundancy, high control loop latency, and the inherent trade-off between response speed and steady-state accuracy in fixed-gain PID controllers, this paper presents a lightweight end-to-end edge vision two-axis gimbal automatic tracking system. To address the link hysteresis problem of traditional relay architectures, a middleware-free direct-connection architecture between OpenMV edge nodes and the Pixhawk flight controller is implemented, significantly reducing system hardware payload and communication latency. To mitigate integral windup and steady-state chattering caused by the mechanical backlash of micro servos, an incremental PID controller with visual front-end signal compensation is designed, which suppresses invalid oscillations through axis-differentiated dead-zone compensation. To overcome the poor adaptability of fixed proportional gains, nonlinear exponential adaptive logic is introduced to resolve the contradiction between rapid target convergence and overshoot suppression. To break through the limitation of flight controller low-level filtering on servo bandwidth, a software-hardware cross-mapping decoupling strategy is adopted to enhance the dynamic response performance of the system. Experimental results demonstrate that in high-frequency transverse reciprocating sinusoidal motion tests, the system can rapidly overcome instantaneous large deviations caused by target mutations; the step response settling time is reduced by 64% compared with the traditional relay architecture; and target reacquisition is completed within 300 ms after 600 ms of target occlusion. While strictly satisfying the onboard payload constraints of small UAVs, the system effectively improves the real-time performance and robustness of visual tracking systems.

Keywords: Small Multi-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (SUAV); Visual Servoing; Incremental PID; MAV Link Communication; End-to-End Control

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