Autonomous UAV Landing on Mobile Platforms

Miniature Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, such as quadrotors, have short operational range because of limited battery capacities. As a result, they need to be charged more frequently. Mobile charging platforms are a solution to this problem. To be charged wirelessly, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles need to communicate with the mobile charging platforms; hence the use of effective, fast and reliable technology, will be very beneficial to the quadrotors, ensuring fast charging and an effective means of transferring required data. In this paper, we consider a solution for autonomous landing of multiple quadrotors, modeled as point-masses. The multiple quadrotors, need to precisely land on mobile platforms, assumed to be equipped with wireless charging. In this article, the platforms are car-like vehicular robots, which are also modeled as point-masses in a dynamical environment, navigating in their workspace. The dynamic environment includes fixed and moving obstacles. We use a Lyapunov-based Control Scheme to propose a set of nonlinear control laws that guide the quadrotors to land safely on the moving vehicular robots which have designated targets. The effectiveness and robustness of the nonlinear acceleration control laws are verified via computer simulations.