Autonomous drone with ability to track and capture an aerial target

This article presents an autonomous aerial system developed for the first challenge of Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Competition (MBZIRC) 2020, consisting of the autonomous interception of an aerial target flying on a variable trajectory and speed, and also bursting several balloons randomly placed over a certain area, also fully autonomous. This work presents a prototype of a capture aerial robot designed specifically for the scenario under consideration, with the aim of integrating the necessary equipment to autonomously detect, track and capture the target drone. Both the hardware architecture and the software that allows to perform this fully autonomous complex mission are described in the paper, as well as the tools used for the integration and execution of the different functional modules. Apart from that, the Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) algorithms implemented for the tracking of the target are also explained. Finally the system is tested in a simulation environment and also validated with real experiments, which most interesting results are presented.