Uav positioning system and method for controlling the position of an uav

A method of controlling an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) along a predefined path using a dynamically controlled positioning stripe, a position estimation module mounted the UAV and a control unit configured to control the velocity of the UAV, wherein active markers are distributed along said positioning stripe, each marker being configured to be switched between an ON state and an OFF state to form different configurations of patterns, and wherein the position estimation module comprises a camera configured to captures images of portions of said positioning stripe, the method comprising the steps of:

• computing the ground truth position pi of the active markers in terms of world coordinates [xiW, yiw, ziw] in order to obtain a 3D representation of the markers;
• capturing successive images of portions of said positioning stripe by the camera of the position estimation module while the UAV is moving along the positioning stripe to obtain successive image planes comprising each a distinctive pattern formed by a set of detected active markers,
• measuring the 2D coordinates Zi of each detected active marker in each image plane;
• assigning a unique label to each detected marker in each image plane as a function of its position relative to the other detected markers in said image plane,
• matching the 2D coordinates zi of each image plane to said 3D representation of the markers in order to track the camera pose over subsequent interval of times, and
• controlling the orientation of UAV as a function of the camera pose.