Abstract
The technology of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increasingly become part of many civil and research applications in recent years. UAVs offer high-quality aerial imaging and the ability to perform quick, flexible and in-depth data acquisition over an area of interest. While navigating in remote environments, UAVs need to be capable of autonomously landing on complex terrains for security, safety and delivery reasons. This is extremely challenging as the structure of these terrains is often unknown, and no prior knowledge can be leveraged. In this study, we present a vision-based autonomous landing system for rotor wing UAVs equipped with a stereo camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). The landing site detection algorithm introduces and evaluates several factors including terrain’s flatness, inclination and steepness. Considering these features we compute map metrics that are used to obtain a landing-score map, based on which we detect candidate landing sites. The 3D reconstruction of the scene is acquired by stereo processing and the pose of the UAV at any given time is estimated by fusing raw data from the inertial sensors with the pose obtained from stereo ORB-SLAM2. Real-world trials demonstrate successful landing in unknown and complex terrains such as suburban and forest areas.
Highlights
In the past decades the use of rotor wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increased in the context of many modern civil applications, including wireless coverage, delivery, precision agriculture, search and rescue
In the first category of approaches, markers are detected based on their appearance or geometry using traditional image features, and the relative pose of the UAV is computed from these extracted feature points
The 3D reconstruction of the scene is acquired by stereo processing and the pose of the UAV is estimated by fusing raw data from the inertial sensors with the pose obtained from stereo ORB-SLAM2 [25]
Summary
In the past decades the use of rotor wing UAVs has increased in the context of many modern civil applications, including wireless coverage, delivery, precision agriculture, search and rescue. UAVs are designed to work cooperatively with Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) to improve safety in navigation, path planning, data delivery. Due to the many diverse applications of UAVs, the study of autonomous landing needs to consider multiple factors and constraints for the development of versatile,. Landing in case of Emergency Drones navigate and perform tasks in mostly unknown and variegated environments. UAVs probably lose contact with the ground. In such cases, they should be able to autonomously detect landing sites for an emergency landing.
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