Vision-based autonomous tracking and landing of a fully-actuated rotorcraft
Published in Control Engineering Practice, vol. 89, 2019
Recommended citation: Bhargavapuri, M., Shastry, A.K., Sinha, H., Sahoo, S.R. and Kothari, M., (2019, August). "Vision-based autonomous tracking and landing of a fully-actuated rotorcraft." Control Engineering Practice (CEP) . vol. 89, (pp. 113-129), doi: 10.1016/j.conengprac.2019.05.015 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967066118306415
Autonomous landing is a challenging phase of flight for an aerial vehicle, especially when attempting to land on a moving target. This paper presents vision-based tracking and landing of a fully-actuated tilt-augmented quadrotor on a moving target. A fully-actuated vehicle allows higher freedom in terms of control design and a larger flight envelope since the position and attitude states are decoupled. An adaptive control law is designed to track a moving target with only relative position information from a camera. Low-cost hardware is used, and experiments are carried out to validate the proposed methodology for targets moving at realistic speeds.