Agile UAV landing control on moving ship in adverse conditions

TL;DR

This paper develops an autonomous UAV landing control system that effectively handles ship oscillations, movement, and environmental disturbances, enabling precise landings on moving ships in adverse ocean conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel control system incorporating rudder-enhanced yaw control and robust PID-based path tracking for UAVs landing on moving ships under challenging conditions.

Findings

Successful simulation of UAV landing on oscillating, moving ships

Effective disturbance rejection including wind gusts and sensor noise

Enhanced yaw control with rudders improves landing accuracy

Abstract

This paper presents an agile Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) landing control by considering the effect of ship's oscillations and moving, and also disturbance (i.e., crosswind) is considered. The presented control system can make the quadrotor UAV autonomously land whilst overcoming these adverse conditions, and the addition of a rudder beneath each propeller is designed to increase the yaw authority which is found to be lacking in heavy-lift quadrotor UAV. The PID flight control system is proposed based on reference-point tracking, allowing the UAV to follow any desired path in 3D space whilst simultaneously yawing to face any desired heading. Realistic saturation limits on actuator outputs to ensure the real-world performance of actuators. Disturbances include randomised gusting wind in 3 axes, and sensor noise on translation and rotation signals to represent noise from the GPS and accelerometer respectively. The results from the simulations demonstrate that the UAV is capable of landing on a ship which is moving with varying heading and oscillating vertically on ocean waves and has the ability to time its descent such that it meets the ship at the peak of a wave to minimise the relative velocity.