Autonomous Quadcopter Landing on a Moving Target.

Alvika Gautam,Srikanth Saripalli,Mandeep Singh,Pedda Baliyarasimhuni Sujit

doi:10.3390/s22031116

Abstract

Autonomous landing on a moving target is challenging because of external disturbances and localization errors. In this paper, we present a vision-based guidance technique with a log polynomial closing velocity controller to achieve faster and more accurate landing as compared to that of the traditional vertical landing approaches. The vision system uses a combination of color segmentation and AprilTags to detect the landing pad. No prior information about the landing target is needed. The guidance is based on pure pursuit guidance law. The convergence of the closing velocity controller is shown, and we test the efficacy of the proposed approach through simulations and field experiments. The landing target during the field experiments was manually dragged with a maximum speed of m/s. In the simulations, the maximum target speed of the ground vehicle was 3 m/s. We conducted a total of 27 field experiment runs for landing on a moving target and achieved a successful landing in 22 cases. The maximum error magnitude for successful landing was recorded to be 35 cm from the landing target center. For the failure cases, the maximum distance of vehicle landing position from target boundary was 60 cm.

Highlights

Quadrotors are ubiquitous in numerous applications such as surveillance [1], agriculture [2,3], and search and rescue operations [4] because of their agile maneuvering, ability to hover, and ease of handling
We evaluate the performance of the developed vision-based pure pursuit (PP) guidance with log polynomial velocity controller using simulations on Microsoft Airsim and MATLAB, followed by experimental demonstration
The approach consisted of PN guidance during the approach phase augmented with a closing velocity controller and proportional-derivative (PD) controller for the final landing phase

Summary

Introduction

Quadrotors are ubiquitous in numerous applications such as surveillance [1], agriculture [2,3], and search and rescue operations [4] because of their agile maneuvering, ability to hover, and ease of handling. The task becomes even more challenging if unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has to track a moving ground target with minimum information while executing the landing maneuver simultaneously. This combined with time-critical requirements of certain applications and limited flight time of quadrotors makes accurate and timely completion of autonomous landing a challenging problem. Interesting results were achieved, these approaches are not necessarily applicable to real-time outdoor applications involving moving targets Both ultrasonic and IR sensors are sensitive to surface and environmental changes, and LIDAR provides a very accurate estimate of distances, it is bulky and expensive for quadrotor applications

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion