Autonomous Pose Correction and Landing System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

The landing is one of the most dangerous maneuvers in the entirety of the flight phase of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs). Sudden changes in the environment cause issues regarding the stability of the drone, which poses a difficult challenge in landing the UAV precisely. To better the safety of any UAVs flying in urban areas, UAVs should be landed carefully, in a GPS-denied or network-disconnected environment, by using vision and inertial data. This paper presents UAV safe landing system which comprises of three sub-systems for detection of designated landing sites and autonomous pose correction, landing site inspection and landing flight control. This paper deals with vision-based target detection and pose correction system in-depth. The airborne vision system is utilized to recognize certain markers on the landing site. The information from the onboard visual sensors and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) is utilized to control and land UAV in a perfect landing trajectory, on a precise location. A series of experiments have been outlined to test and optimize the proposed method using Parrot AR.Drone 2.0.