Autonomous Landing of a Multirotor Micro Air Vehicle on a High Velocity Ground Vehicle

TL;DR

This paper presents a system enabling a quadcopter to autonomously land on a high-speed ground vehicle using a Kalman filter-based relative position estimation and a specialized controller, validated through successful high-speed landings.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system architecture for autonomous landing of multirotor MAVs on fast-moving ground vehicles, including a Kalman filter and control strategy, validated experimentally.

Findings

Successfully landed quadcopter on a car moving at 50 km/h

Demonstrated reliable autonomous landing in multiple trials

Validated system architecture through real-world experiments

Abstract

While autonomous multirotor micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) are uniquely well suited for certain types of missions benefiting from stationary flight capabilities, their more widespread usage still faces many hurdles, due in particular to their limited range and the difficulty of fully automating their deployment and retrieval. In this paper we address these issues by solving the problem of the automated landing of a quadcopter on a ground vehicle moving at relatively high speed. We present our system architecture, including the structure of our Kalman filter for the estimation of the relative position and velocity between the quadcopter and the landing pad, as well as our controller design for the full rendezvous and landing maneuvers. The system is experimentally validated by successfully landing in multiple trials a commercial quadcopter on the roof of a car moving at speeds of up to 50 km/h.