Aerial Autonomous Docking Control Method of Quadrotor UAV

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) can autonomously assemble in the air, so as to deal with different scenarios and mission requirements. However, on the problem of autonomous aerial docking of rotorcraft UAVs, there are few existing research and most of them focus on docking with hovering UAVs. This paper proposes a solution to the problem of docking with hovering or moving quadrotor. The whole docking process is divided into the approach phase, the tracking phase and the docking phase. In the tracking phase and the docking phase, guidance methods are proposed according to the phase targets correspondingly. A docking controller which can adaptively estimate the desired point velocity and external disturbance is used to control the quadrotor UAV to complete the docking. The final simulation results show that the proposed method can complete the autonomous docking with a moving quadrotor UAV under disturbance.