A vision based onboard approach for landing and position control of an autonomous multirotor UAV in GPS-denied environments

Abstract

We describe our work on multirotor UAVs and focus on our method for autonomous landing and position control. The paper describes the design of our landing pad and the vision based detection algorithm that estimates the 3D-position of the UAV relative to the landing pad. A cascaded controller structure stabilizes velocity and position in the absence of GPS signals by using a dedicated optical flow sensor. Practical experiments prove the quality of our approach.