Outdoor autonomous landing on a moving platform for quadrotors using an omnidirectional camera

Abstract

This paper proposes a vision-based target following and landing system for a quadrotor vehicle on a moving platform. The system is consisted with vision-based landing site detection and locating algorithm using an omnidirectional lens. Latest smartphone was attached on the UAV and served as an on-board image acquisition and process unit. Measurements from the omnidirectional camera are combined with a proper dynamic model in order to estimate position and velocity of the moving platform. An adaptive control scheme was implemented on the flight computer to deal with unknown disturbances in outdoor environment. The system was validated on a quadrotor UAV and the vehicle successfully landed on the moving platform in outdoor flight tests <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .