Minimum Jerk based Guidance for Autonomous Soft -Landing of Quadrotor

A novel soft-landing trajectory generation strategy for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is presented in this paper. Towards this objective, a jerk minimization-based optimal control problem is formulated to generate the trajectory. Hard boundary constraints on position, velocity and acceleration are enforced to facilitate soft-landing and smooth handover between consecutive phases. An acceleration-based optimization problem is adopted to compute the time-to-go. The developed algorithm provides a closed-form solution, ensuring minimal computational requirements. Results obtained are illustrated through extensive simulations on a quadrotor platform. Simulation results show that this method produces smooth trajectories to soft land on the target even when the wind is introduced as a disturbance.