Finite-Time Tracking of Moving Platform With Single Camera for Quadrotor Autonomous Landing

This paper presents a finite-time visual servoing control strategy for the autonomous landing of a quadrotor onto a tilting and moving landing vehicle. The proposed method, called Finite-Time Dynamic Visual Servo (FTDVS) control, utilizes a computer vision technique called Virtual Reticle Image Plane (VRIP) to track four observable features on the landing plane called landmarks. To represent the sea state, target-plane tilting motion is modelled using monochromatic sinusoidal waves. VRIP exploits the sinusoidal tilting pose of the landing plane and calculates the time period of the tilting motion. Based on this time period, the proposed FTDVS control strategy enables the quadrotor to search for suitable landing windows on a tilting target plane. The proposed finite-time controller converges the tracking errors to zero in finite-time during a landing maneuver. First, a rigorous stability analysis of the FTDVS control law is presented, followed by simulations demonstrating acceptable performance in terms of tracking accuracy when compared to existing controllers for autonomous landing on moving targets. The proposed method has been experimentally validated in an indoor environment.