Cooperative Relative Pose Estimation to Aid Landing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle on a Moving Platform

In this paper, we develop a method to estimate the relative position and relative heading of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) attempting to land on a moving platform using range-only measurements under GPS-denied conditions. Landing problems typically require precise estimation of relative position and heading, the proposed solution estimates relative pose between the platform (in this case a ship deck) and the landing multirotor. Vision-based landing techniques although accurate will fail under hostile weather conditions with the lack of Global Positioning System (GPS). This formulation investigates the effect on estimation quality when a single vehicle attempts to land using measurements from the ship only versus a team of multirotors assisting a vehicle to land on the ship. A multi-vehicle simulator has been developed in MATLAB/Simulink that facilitates testing our approaches. The simulation results clearly demonstrate the advantage of using a team for assisted landing rather than alone vehicle performing relative pose estimation using a limited range measurements.