Autonomous Landing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle on a Mobile Platform

Landing an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) on a mobile vehicle, has been an active research area due to its much needed applicability in numerous directions such as landing an aerial vehicle on the international space station or a ship at sea. Such research is conducted mainly in two directions: control-based and vision-based. Vision-based approaches require sensing from cameras that detect features, such as visual markers, on the mobile vehicle to estimate and track the mobile vehicle pose till the landing pose. The visual markers are usually utilized for feature detection, which most mobile vehicles might not have. This paper proposes a new approach for achieving autonomous landing of a UAV by generating constrained uniform B-spline trajectories assuming known pose of both the UAV and the UGV. Then applying PID controller to regulate velocity set point to land the UAV on the mobile vehicle. The overall effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated using ROS/Gazebo simulations, with a UAV (Px4 enabled IRIS) and a mobile vehicle (Jackal from ClearPath Robotics). Landing tasks for static and dynamic cases are carried out and the findings and limitations are stated thereafter.