Vision-based Autonomous Landing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle on a Motional Unmanned Surface Vessel

This paper has developed a vision-based control approach for autonomous tracking and landing on a motional Unmanned surface vessel (USV) with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). First, a novel three-stage visual detection method is proposed to estimate the relative 3D position between UAV and USV, where the USV stays in a suitable view of the camera of the UAV. Then a PID controller is designed to regulate the attitude of the quadrotor and the movement of the vessel, which enables the successful landing procedure of the UAV on a motional USV. Finally, lake experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.