Vision Based Autonomous Landing of Multirotor UAV on Moving Platform

This paper investigates solutions for the fundamental yet challenging problem of autonomous landing of multirotor Unammaned Aerial Vehicles UAVs. In addition to landing on static targets, tracking and landing on a moving platform is addressed, as a solution to facilitate the deployment of the UAV. The paper presents the design of a new landing pad and its relative pose estimation. The fusion of inertial measurement with the estimated pose is considered to ensure a high sampling rate, and to increase the manoeuvrability of the vehicle. Two filters are designed to conduct the fusion, an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) and an Extended H∞ (EH∞). The extensive simulation and practical tests permitted identification of the challenges of the landing task. Adequate solutions to these challenges are proposed to lessen their impact on landing precision.