A Vision-based navigation system for landing procedure

Abstract

An autonomous vision-based landing system was designed and its performance is analysed and measured by an UAS. The system equipment is based on a single camera to determine its position and attitude with respect to a well-defined landing pattern. The developed procedure is based on photogrammetric Space Resection Solution, which provides the position and camera attitude reckoning starting from at least three, not aligned, reference control points whose image coordinates may be measured in the image camera frame. Five circular coloured targets were placed on a specific landing pattern, their 2D image frame coordinates was extracted through a particular algorithm. The aim of this work is to compute UAS precise position and attitude from single image, in order to have a good approach to landing field. This procedure can be used in addition or for replacement of GPS tracking and can be applied when the landing field is movable or located on a moving platform, the UAS will follow the landing pattern until the landing phase will be closed.