Autonomous landing of a vtol UAV on a moving platform

In this study, a control strategy has been developed for autonomous landing of an UAV that is capable of vertical landing and take-off on a moving platform. This study consists of tracking, precise tracking and landing stages. This study starts with a UAV that has arrived at the rendezvous area and a moving platform known to be in the rendezvous area. After landing platform detection, tracking stage is started. Thus the movement of the UAV to the landing platform is provided by using target coordinate information's. After reducing the distance between the landing platform and the UAV sufficiently, the precise tracking phase is started. At this stage, the platform is followed at a fixed altitude for a certain period of time. When the landing stage is started, the altitude is lowered to the safe free fall point while the x and y axis position controls continue. When the safe free fall altitude is reached, all UAV rotors are stopped and the autonomous landing is completed successfully. With this study, firstly, the UAV is landed on a moving platform in the simulation environment. Then, the application of the study was carried out in a real test environment using a real UAV and a moving platform. The developed solution is tested under various moving platform trajectories (linear or circular), velocities (25 cm/s or 50 cm/s) and wind effects. PD controllers are used for UAV control. On the other hand, ArUco tags were used to obtain position information in the application study. With the study carried out in this context, an autonomous landing architecture on a mobile platform that increases the autonomy capability of vertical landing and take-off UAVs and increases their mission and range capacities has been revealed. In line with the results obtained in both simulation and application studies, it has been revealed that autonomous landing on a mobile landing platform is possible with the proposed solution.