Vision‐assisted deep stall landing for a fixed‐wing UAV

Abstract

This paper reports a guidance and control method for vision-assisted deep stall landing for a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). With a deep stall maneuver, a fixed-wing UAV can land on a confined area with a deep flight path angle. This paper combines vision-assisted guidance for approach and deep stall maneuvers for intuitive fixed-wing UAV operation. A target landing area is chosen and tracked by a human operator with a computer mouse on the aerial image. Then, a line-of-sight vector is created to generate a guidance command. The proposed method is composed of two phases: a vision-assisted approach (Phase I) and vision-assisted deep stall landing (Phase II). In Phase I, the UAV is guided toward a mouse-tracked landing area while maintaining the flight speed and altitude. In Phase II, the deep stall is initiated by a deep stall start algorithm, and the UAV is guided to the mouse-tracked target landing area. The feasibility of the suggested method is verified by a series of flight tests, where the testbed UAV successfully landed on a 10 m × 10 m target.