Autonomous Landing of a quadrotor on a moving target using integrated sensor

Abstract

Multirotors are highly agile and versatile flying robots. Therefore, in the last decade, a considerable number of research projects contributed to the autonomous navigation of Multirotor. In this research, an autonomous system capable of landing on a moving target using onboard sensing and control with a novel localization method is presented. The algorithm developed in this project does not require any type of communication between the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and the target. The control scheme utilized in this study, does not require additional state estimation on the UAV such as GPS, or visual odometry. In this research it is assumed that the UAV is in the close vicinity of the target (a radius of 2 meters from the target). The system is expected to detect the moving target, track it and land on it. To develop such a system a fusion-based relative localization method has been presented. In this study, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in performing an accurate autonomous landing on the moving target has been experimented. The fusion-based localization algorithm integrates data from one-dimensional LiDAR, Camera, and IMU to localize the UAV relative to the target in real-time and by having a 26 Hz update rate. The data from the localization unit will be given to the higher-level controller to determine the desired pose and collective thrust of the drone. Then the desired pose will be fed into the lowerlevel controllers where it controls the desired speed for each rotor on the quadrotor. Since the processing load of the algorithm is handled onboard, computational load minimization of the autonomous landing algorithm is a must. The validity of this algorithm has been tested through experiments and suggested advanced control architecture is tested in simulation. The test environment includes the quadrotor to be equipped with LiDAR, camera, and onboard computer (Raspberry pi 4) and the experiment requires an Unmanned Ground Vehicle marked with the specific marker as well.