A Lightweight Toggleable Adhesion Prototype for Multirotor UAV Landing on Tilting Platforms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight, toggleable adhesion system for multirotor UAVs to enhance landing success on tilting surfaces, demonstrating significant improvements in reliability under challenging maritime conditions.

Contribution

A novel motor-driven corkscrew adhesion mechanism that actively engages and releases during UAV landings on tilting platforms, improving reliability in maritime environments.

Findings

Landing success increased from 40% to 80% with the new system.

The system performs reliably on tilts up to 43 degrees.

A simple PID controller suffices for effective operation.

Abstract

Autonomous multirotor landings on uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) are critical for persistent maritime operations but remain challenging due to wave-induced tilt, wind disturbances, and limited landing area. Many existing approaches exhibit small pose tolerance for reliable landing. This paper presents a lightweight toggleable adhesion mechanism to improve landing reliability. The system uses a motor-driven corkscrew that engages hook-and-loop material on the landing surface, enabling active adhesion during landing and controlled release during takeoff. We evaluate a prototype using a modified Crazyflie 2.0 and a custom tilting platform at fixed angles representative of extreme wave conditions. Using only a simple vertical PID controller, the proposed approach increases landing success from an average of 40% (baseline) to 80% across platform tilts up to 43 degrees using appropriately selected actuation settings.